What’s Missing from Halloweens Nowadays? All Treats, No Tricks

  Halloween isn’t what it used to be.

  This year’s Halloween was, once again, a quiet one where I live. 

  Traditional trick or treating, with kids going door to door, has largely been replaced in our neighborhood by a Halloween parade. Kids in costumes, many accompanied by their parents, line up at around 5 p..m. – well before dark – and parade in unison down streets lined with candy-dispensing grownups seated in lawn chairs. It’s become a neighborhood tradition that everyone, kids and grownups alike, seems to enjoy.

  The number of trick or treaters who independently came to our door after sundown that evening:  zero.

  I enjoy the parade as much as the next person and look forward to it as the social event it as become. But, at risk of being branded a codger, I can’t helping thinking that what once was a venerable part of traditional Halloweens has all but been lost.

  The words “trick or treat,” though still spoken on countless doorsteps, have virtually lost their relevance.

 Treats are handed out in abundance.

 Tricks? Largely an anachronism.

  Tricks used to be half of the fun on Halloween. In the old North Boise neighborhood where I grew up, it was hard to say which we looked forward to most: the treats or the tricks. Tricks added spice to the sugary evening. They were expected and, with rare exceptions, they were harmless.

  A perennial favorite was lowering the street lights. Streetlights in those days hung from cables attached to telephone poles catty corner from each other at intersections. Devices on the poles allowed power company workers to lower them for changing bulbs or performing other repairs.

  It wasn’t just power company workers who knew about these  devices, of course. Every kid in the neighborhood knew about them. It was a rare morning after Halloween night that they weren’t hanging far below their usual height.

  Tipping over trash cans was another Halloween prank. It made a mess in the alleys and was annoying to the property owners, but nobody got hurt and the messes were quickly cleaned up.

  The most common form of mischief, by a wide margin, was soaping windows.

  Soaping windows, for those unfamiliar with the practice, was the simple act of writing on a window, using a bar of soap as the writing instrument. It was a popular Halloween trick, fun but harmless. The soap was easily removed the next day. 

  This brings us to Howard.

  Howard was the neighborhood fix-it man and a mentor to most of the kids within a block radius. He worked as a troubleshooter for a utility company and seemed capable of making or fixing just about anything.

  Howard was the go-to guy for making a soapbox derby racer. They were primitive as vehicles go,  four wheels on a wooden platform with a seat, a plywood body and ropes attached to the front wheels for steering. A soapbox derby race was held every summer on the Capitol Boulevard hill, with hundreds of participants. Thanks to  Howard, no kid in our neighborhood ever lacked a racer.

  If you had a flat tire on your bicycle, Howard could fix it in no time. 

  A broken chain on your bike? Howard was your man.

  When we were older, he took us fishing and hunting, teaching us how to do both successfully and safely. He knew all the best places to go. We seldom returned empty handed.

  He was the kids’ best friend every day of the year but one. For reasons that were never known, Howard hated Halloween.

  It was a perennial mystery where he and his wife, Fern, disappeared to every year on Halloween night. With the exception of church on Sundays and occasional get-togethers with friends, they seldom went anywhere. On Halloween night, however, their home was dark and silent as a grave. Not a single light burning, no box of candy or popcorn balls on the front porch.

  As you can imagine, this was both inexplicable and a bit galling to those of us who had come to think of Howard as a friend. How could he be so friendly and helpful to kids all year and become such a grinch on Halloween?

  One year I decided to get even. I would soap his windows.

  To make absolutely sure he wasn’t home, I watched the house carefully for signs of life.

  Nothing. No moving shadows, no flicker of a flashlight. Once again, Howard and Fern had vanished. The coast was clear. Time to make my move.

  Quiet as a church mouse, I crept to the picture window on the front of the house. Looking both ways to make sure no one was watching, I retrieved the soap from my pocket and reached for the window, intending to write something incredibly clever and cutting on it.

  Then, a disembodied voice:

  “Don’t touch that window!”

  I about came out of my skin. A few yards behind me – silhouetted against the Halloween moon – was the unmistakable figure of Howard perched on the limb of a tree, holding a shotgun.

  It was known to those who knew him well that Howard loaded some of his shotgun shells with rock salt, the dubious theory being that they’d cause pain but not a serious injury. Not that that made a difference on this particular occasion. There was but one prudent course of action.

  I ran like Dracula with his hair on fire.

  I never did know whether Howard recognized me in my costume that night, or what it was that he had against Halloween. The incident was never mentioned, and we remained friends into my teenage years and beyond. He built me my first guitar amplifier.

  Frightening as the window-soaping experience was, it remains one my favorite Halloween memories. The shotgun was over the top, but long after the treats have been forgotten I still recall the spine-tingling thrill of sneaking up to that window, soap at the ready.

  Treats are fine.

  But there was something to be said for tricks as well.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.