This Friday for Halloween, thousands of Hutchinson families will flock to trunk-or-treats in parking lots and to a select few destination neighborhoods for door-to-door trick-or-treating, especially Hyde Park, East Sherman Avenue, and around Rambler Road, where households may spend several hundred dollars on candy as the busiest spots may get more than 1,000 trick-or-treaters, depending on the weather.
At the same time, trick-or-treaters are likely to be scarce in most neighborhoods. Even in perfectly safe residential neighborhoods, a house with decorations up and a porch light on may be lucky to get a dozen trick-or-treaters.
It may be a self-perpetuating cycle. Households stop handing out candy because they get so few trick-or-treaters. And families stop trick-or-treating in that neighborhood because so few houses are handing out candy, opting to go to trunk-or-treats or busy neighborhoods.
We appreciate the spirit of the people and groups in those busy neighborhoods and those that set up trunk-or-treats, providing activities for the community. But it isn’t the same, and doesn’t fulfill the same purpose, as families trick-or-treating in their own neighborhoods.
Trick-or-treating is at its best when it is about having positive, personal interactions with one’s neighbors: folks getting to ooh and aah over a baby in a pumpkin costume, or commenting on how much kids have grown since they saw them last. It’s especially good for connections between young families and empty-nesters in the same neighborhood. Those interactions help build and maintain familiarity with neighbors.
Part of the shift away from neighborhood trick-or-treating can be attributed to a desire for safety at Halloween. Parents have been bombarded for decades with frightful tales of poison or razor blades hidden in kids’ candy.
Except, those tales are virtually all urban legends. Neither of the two famous deaths from the 1970s was actually from trick-or-treating. In one, a 5-year-old died after getting into heroin that belonged to his uncle, and the family tried to blame the death on poisoning. In the other, Ronald Clark O’Bryan was later found guilty of poisoning his own son’s candy in an attempt to get money from a life insurance policy.
Houses giving THC edibles or other drugs to trick-or-treaters is just another modern iteration of the poisoned candy myth. Nobody is doing that. Halloween is easy for misanthropes: they just leave their porch light off and don’t decorate, and people leave them alone.
Traffic is a much greater danger to trick-or-treaters than poisoned candy, and destination trick-or-treating means more children and more cars in one place, because people are generally driving to take their children there.
We are happy, though, to share that Sherman Avenue has plans for crossing guards at the intersections with Plum and Severance streets for the third year in a row.
A 2018 study of data on vehicle-pedestrian collisions from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that pedestrian deaths on average were 43% higher on Halloween from 1975 to 2016. The analysis by John A. Staples, Candace Yip, and Donald A. Redelmeier found increased risk for pedestrians on Halloween, regardless of what day of the week it was, whether in urban or rural areas, what region of the country, for both boys and girls, and for all age groups younger than 50.
But enough families trick-or-treating in their own neighborhoods, where they don’t have to drive to get where they are going, could reduce the number of cars on the road and improve pedestrian safety on Halloween.
We know reversing the trend away from neighborhood trick-or-treating is difficult. To sustain itself, it takes a critical mass of both homes giving out candy (or other treats) and families with children the right ages for trick-or-treating. And that is harder when there are simply fewer children in our communities to begin with, as family sizes have declined.
But if we want neighborhood trick-or-treating back, it has to start somewhere. So if you live in one of those neighborhoods where trick-or-treating is rare, we encourage you to put up your Halloween decorations, pick up a couple bags of fun-size candy, and turn your porch light on Friday.
We suggest something that you like but rarely buy for yourself. We find those make the best Halloween candy, anyway, and it’s not too bad if you have some leftovers.
– The Hutchinson Tribune Editorial Board