LogFAQs > #976974192

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I don't really know exactly what gave rise to trunk or treating but it sounds pretty lame to me. Sounds like it's either a product of suburban safety paranoia or our on-the-go culture where everything needs to be done as efficiently as possible now. I'm sure most kids don't mind cause it's candy, especially if they start growing up where it's all they know, but to me a big part of the fun was walking around the neighborhood

It's a bit of both of the factors you identified, but also a significant part of it is that you can't really walk around many modern neighbourhoods. Most suburbs are too sprawling and often don't even have sidewalks because they've been so overwhelmingly designed around the expectation that people will just drive everywhere they want to go, and most neighbourhoods that aren't suburbs are mostly made up of apartment/condo buildings and the only one you can even access is your own. Even in more medium-density areas that are designed to be walkable, it's common for street-level properties to be commercial (with residential behind/above), so accessing homes from the street can be tricky.

Given the choice between having kids wander around streets that are fundamentally designed to be unsafe for pedestrians, wander the halls of an apartment building where it may or may not be the norm for kids to trick-or-treat, or get together with a bunch of your friends and your kids' friends and just exchange candy directly at a small costume party, I can actually understand why trunk-or-treating wins out there. The other options just aren't overly appealing. Traditional trick-or-treating really only works in neighbourhoods that mostly consist of single-family homes or townhouses/duplexes, but that are also relatively dense and therefore easy to get around on foot, and nobody really builds neighbourhoods like that anymore.