Not really on topic but I figured it I would ask anyway. Last year, Halloween was nuts here. We had tons of kids show up. This year, we had 15 kids show up. Insane! My friend Fred just emailed me and said 1 kid showed up. I called my friend across town and he had no one show up. Not a single kid!

Was it like this for anyone else on the board? I remember Halloween as just tons of kids out on the streets going door to door. Are the parents just doing the mall thing? What is going on? Now I have all this candy I have to eat. Thanks a lot kids.

I hear ya-- last year and many years prior, it's been great out here too--

This year, we had a few kids, but then NONE after 7:30pm.... strange... like some kinda HALLOWEEN III type curfew all over the city....... !

ooooo spooky.

Happy halloween anyway ya'll.

My wife reports that not one kid showed up and we live in a housing development full of families with children. I work in a more urban environment and I saw kids and their parents out and about around 6 o'clock or so, but once the sun was down, the streets were deserted. While I think that kids going out on Halloween is really not substantially more dangerous than it was a generation ago, the popular perception has changed. Parents my age definitely seem more fearful and protective of their children than the parents I knew as a kid - including my own. It's not just Halloween either. I remember in my hometown neighborhood that kids were out on Friday nights, tooling around on bikes, playing kick ball, all until way after the sun went down. My current neighborhood has a similar concentration of kids and while I occasionally see them out during the summer months, I certainly don't see them outside with any regularity. Chalk it up to stimuli that can only be experienced in front of a TV or computer. I'm not throwing stones, I just think that's the way it is. My guess is that private Halloween parties that combine video games or movie watching have taken the place of Trick or Treating.

D.

This must all be the blowback from the Chris Hansen specials. :)

Walking around our neighborhood here in Gainesville, Fl, my wife and I saw quite a few trick or treaters, and that was at close to 8:30. We went to a local haunted house attraction that was packed, with tons of tweens in costumes waiting to get in. So Halloween seems to be alive and well in these parts, though I was a bit disconcerted when I turned on the local news at 11PM, and the lead story was a fear mongering piece about how child molesters could abduct your kid while they're out trick or treating. I think I miss razor blades in candied apples.

Mesa, AZ-- We had over 120 kids. Wiped us out. We ran out of candy at 7:30. Incredible! Haven't seen a Halloween like this in 10 years.

About 40 in North Hollywood, between 6:00 and 8:30, on a street where only one other house seemed to be giving away candy.

Fewer kids than usual -- we were giving out big fistfuls of candy and dispensed maybe only 2/3rds of the bucketload. However, hearteningly, the Trick or Treaters who came to our house were primarily kids and they were all dressed up, really cute. No "hoboes" this year. Also, we noticed there were almost no teenagers or adults out sponging for free candy this year. A few, but not epidemic as in past years.

We saw a few groups by my sisters neighborhood, but over here the dish I left put was surprisingly full, even with the music and lights I had on. The police apparently enacted some inane rule that no one over 16 could go out with a mask on. Something about thieves using masks to rob stores. Well, DUH! My son went out with me supervising and my nephew tagging along and he still managed to gently scare a few people with his jigsaw mask, including his grandmother who he nearly gave a heart attack, hee hee.

According to a recent UK news report, children have never been more closely guarded by adults. Apparently it will undermine their confidence and lead to resentment of adults. When we were kids, we could take chances - the school of hard knocks if you will - but those days are gone now and we're breeding a generation of cotton-wrapped apron-clingers. Buckle up, people.

Victor

Last year my family moved across town in our inner-ring suburb, a little farther away from the City, to be closer to my son's school and buds. We were surprised then how few bused-in visitors we had, and how few kids in general, not to mention the sharp drop in uncostumed teens. This year seemed even more scanty. It's nice to hear, though, that some neighborhoods are still as sugar-charged as ever.

My folks had 150+ in Randolph, NJ. They live on a corner of a main street, and are always blitzed; my mom says the kids don't walk up the street, but merely go from corner to corner anymore. My generation pounded the pavements, let me tell you, up, down, and all around.

Three knocks/doorbells for the entirety of the night. Fewer than ten kids total.

It really didn't seem like Halloween for most of the day. Aside from the occasional staff member in a witch hat or a caterer in a wizard hat, there wasn't a whole lot to see at Johns Hopkins.

Driving around Baltimore between 5 and 6 p.m., there were no costumes or any other indication that it was Halloween to be seen. It did make me wonder if a real sense of apathy had set in with regards to the holiday. I also wondered if this trend would carry over to Thanksgiving and Christmas of this year.

Of course, this Halloween fell right smack dab in the middle of the week, so that could have been a factor.

But as it turns out, I actually live in a college neighborhood so towards 9 p.m., things started to pick up and before you knew it, there were groups of people in costume on almost every block.

And that made me realize how Halloween has sort of changed. I saw very few children yesterday let alone children in costume. But as the hour grew late, everyone I saw dressed up and having a good time was either an adult or a teenager. Most of the reason for this was that they were bar hopping and going to Halloween parties.

I eventually found myself in Baltimore's Fells' Point which was a complete party. The streets were closed off and PACKED with people in costume. Local rock station, 98 ROCK was hosting the event and it was so crowded that it was hard to walk around.

And not a single child in sight. My date compared the vibe to Mardi Gras. Our favorite costume was a group of guys dressed as Spartans from 300 who kept breaking into chants from the movie. It made me realize what a strange and fascinating place 300 now occupies in pop culture.

But the lesson here is that Halloween has become less of a holiday for children to dress up and have fun and more of an excuse for adults to dress up and party.

The comparison to Mardi Gras was apt.

Speaking of Mardi Gras, the NYC Greenwich Village Halloween Parade was really crowded and crazy for a Wednesday night. My friends (Zombie Hooker, Zombie John, and The Skeleton) all braved the rowdy Parade march with me. Lots of drunk people bumping into us, blaring PA systems, and short-tempered cops (can't blame 'em). Good thing I was going as Dracula, so my glowering moments of Basil Gogos rage were well in character. Actually, I saw lots of funny costumes and enough people simply making fools of themselves that I kept smiling and laughing evily behind the fangs and blood.

There were people shooting each other in Union Square afterwards. Does that trump razors in apples?

I haven't had any trick or treaters in years, but I'm usually home well after dark on weeknights. I live in a condo complex. There are a few kids here, including a toddler next door who runs to the screen door and talks to me every time I leave for work, but not too many older kids. I usually buy candy just in case, but not this year. I didn't get home until after 10 last night.

When I was a kid we trick or treated until 9 or 10 at night, with a pillowcase for our booty, because plastic pumpkin baskets were for babies and they don't hold much. I realize now what a pain in the ass we must have been to our neighbors, many of whom were older retired people who probably went to bed early. Then we'd go home and carefully sort and trade our treats and eat enough candy to make ourselves sick. Good times. :P

I live in a suburb of Salt Lake City, and we had tons of kids. Best year in a few. We must have given out 300+ pieces of candy. Things wrapped up about 8:30-9:00.

In my Seattle suburb, I had maybe 20 kids last night. The last two or three years, I have noticed a genuine slowdown in the numbers of trick and treaters. Aside from the fear-mongering regarding potential predators, I wonder if all the people who no longer eat at McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken are also not allowing their kids to go out tricking and treating? That's simply speculation on my part, but I do feel that there are more private (and well supervised) parties than in the past.

Halloween is nothing more than an opportunity for the establishment to promote a negative, stereotypical, and hurtful image of witches.

Seriously though...

In my neighborhood, it was all parents with babies dressed as pumpkins and hot dogs. In my neighborhood, most people go business to business rather than bothering with houses.

Man I'm glad I was a kid back when you were allowed to have fun and be a kid.

What's weird to me about Halloween is that you can have severed limbs strewn across a yard, bodies hanging from trees, splattered blood splashed over lawns and nobody bats an eye. But put up a cross at Christmas time and people demand you run for the hills... :lol:(whoops, I just got religiopolitico)...and I could care less about any of it...

I prefer the stereotype to the real thing.

On *private* property? Not that I've ever heard.

And plenty of people complain about Halloween every year. They tend to be the same people complaining that they're being pilloried for putting up crosses on private property.

I guess it depends on whether you watch the socialist controlled news media or that "fair and balanced" ™ stuff.

We all could care less about any of it, though. Whoops, indeed. <_<

Hmmmm---well, this Halloween, which, unlike the last couple of years, was actually nice & warm at 56 degrees here in the D, was relatively normal. I saw one little girl running down the street with a bag and green makeup on---I guess she had tried her best to get that Frankenstein look. Living in an apartment,you don't get trick or treaters anyway. Also saw 2 grown men walking down Woodward Ave. where I had ventured to get some pizza, one with a horribly disfigured face mask on---I thought it was hilarious. The Michigan State Fairgrounds even had their own haunted house on the grounds this year.

The really cool thing about Halloween this year, though, was hearing about the 2,000 volunteers who turned out to patrol various neighborhoods to watch out for fires. According to the news,a couple of Canadians even showed up to help out. For the last 12 years, Devil's Night, when various abandoned houses would be torched in Detroit by stupid idiots just for the hell of it, has been re-christened as Angel's Night, and the number of fires (as well as a tougher curfew for teenagers by the mayor) have gone down completely. That's why I got irritated reading a book on Halloween that mentions Devil's Night as an ongoing thing--granted the book was 5 years old, but it just irked me as a Detroiter that the author hadn't even bothered to find out that Devil's Night has been a thing of the past here. Anyway, I enjoyed seeing houses with spider web and skulls as well as little ghosts strung throughout a tree---it made a nice complement with the falling leaves--just kidding! :D