Sunday, November 04, 2012

Non-local trick-or-treaters

This post is a few days late, but here goes.  As I was driving home from work on Halloween, I hit awful traffic, so ditched the freeway and took side streets to get home.  I cut through the "nice" neighborhood that is only a few blocks away and it was JAM PACKED with kids, people, cars, everything.   Normally, it's a pretty low key, quiet, uncrowded neighborhood.

What is the deal with people leaving their own neighborhoods and going to the "nicer" neighborhoods for candy?  When we were young, we just went in our neighborhood.  We never would've had our parents take us to a more affluent neighborhood for better candy.  I guess the thought just never crossed our minds.  We wanted to run around in the streets we were already familiar with and with people we already knew, not roam around a strange neighborhood.

Is it Robin Hood trick-or-treating?  All I know is that if I lived in one of those homes, I'd be demanding addresses for kids when they came to the door.  Not a local resident, no candy for you!  Call me a grinch, but it just ain't right.  Actually, instead of not giving them anything, I'd give them the lame candy and save the chocolate for the locals.  A two-tiered system.

It'd be fine if you were there with people who live in the neighborhood.  But they aren't.  I was chatting with a woman at work who took her kids to a nicer neighborhood.  She said they give out the king size bars instead of the trick-or-treat sized ones.  Really?  Really lame.  Because I'm sure that's what kids need.  King-sized chocolate bars.  I'm not sure exactly what I hate about this, but it just seems so wrong. Like it's not in the spirit of trick-or-treating, but maybe it's just me.

3 comments:

Michelle said...

I agree, wholeheartedly! I am happy to live in a neighborhood with few kids. We leave our lights off and haven't had a trick-or-treater in years.

Stephanie said...

Yeah, I live in an apartment building with a gated entrance, so no trick-or-treaters for me either for the past six years.

Wes Lambert said...

This has been happening in my parent's neighborhood since I can remember. My mom kept two types of candy. The giant, full-size bars for the locals, and the tiny, junk candy from last year for the non-locals. She would figure out who was who of the children she knew and decided based-on that.
I don't it ever really worked, because many of the people nearby, did not use this tactic.
We continued to get more and more people coming in from out of the area, bus-loads sometimes.
I think the only thing they could do would be to get a gate on the entrance and exit from the community, but that proposal never succeeded.