Defending Derision of Trunk-or-Treat Halloween

Last year I caused a firestorm by advocating that we save trick-or-treat and not accept trunk-or-treat. I respond to the criticism I received in this post.

Trick-or-Treat Is Worth Saving was the title of my article that I penned for Strong Towns last Halloween. My thesis: the American tradition should not be lost to our dangerous streets, explicitly arguing that the trunk-or-treat version was a cheap imitation.

Sadly, a new, sterile version of this Halloween tradition called trunk-or-treat has been gaining popularity because of our dangerous streets…

People were mad. Not everyone, my sentiment had support, too. But I also think it’s important to embrace the critiques of our ideas—it keeps them sharp.

I will use this College Towns post to revisit my plea and to defend myself from the critiques. I have outlined the various criticisms of my trunk-or-treat derision below, and I will address each.

1. Urbanites just look down on other parts of the country.

2. It’s elitist to judge how people celebrate Halloween.

3. Halloween destination neighborhoods are a big factor.

4. Trunk-or-treat saves time and is easy for parents.

5. Trunk-or-treat is just a supplement. It hasn’t replaced Trick-or-Treat.

6. Who cares?

1. Urbanites just look down on other parts of the country.

There were commenters who believed the attacks on trunk-or-treat were standard culture war fodder: Coastal elitists hating on Middle America. This is missing several points.

First, I mentioned that trunk-or-treat was a perfectly reasonable option in rural areas. How could kids even walk from house to house if they are miles apart? Getting together at the local rural church makes sense in our rural communities.

Next, the biggest missed point here is that the tradition of trick-or-treating is a suburban institution. It was born, fostered, and proliferated through the American suburbs.

The way we collectively think about Halloween trick-or-treating comes from imagery of the classic American suburb. Our great Halloween pop culture has long been associated with our sprawl, single-family neighborhoods. These mediums always depict door-to-door trick-or-treat scenes.

Trick-or-treat is Americana.

The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrates the classic suburban American tradition well.

My first year living in NYC I wondered how kids were going to trick-or-treat. Where I lived in Manhattan, they didn’t go door-to-door in apartments but rather around to businesses in the neighborhood. This makes sense for a dense city, but it’s just different than the general conception.

Our popular imagination of the holiday has been built through the suburbs. In advocating for trick-or-treating, I am advocating for a suburban institution, not the other way around.

2. It’s elitist to judge how people celebrate Halloween.

Some people were angry that I was judging how others were celebrating the American tradition as if I knew what was better than regular folks. Lost on this, I was careful to mention that individual parents were rational for making this choice when our roads are dangerous.

Without taking local community action, parents make the rational choice to forego trick-or-treating and instead attempt to keep the tradition alive through a more sterile and controlled environment.

My point was broader than one individual, but rather thinking about the eroding tradition through collective choices. Large, fast vehicles with distracted drivers take up more space than ever before. We’ve ceded it.

Fixing our dangerous streets cannot be done alone, so I emphasize that individual families are forced to do trunk-or-treat.

I also think that wealthy neighborhoods are more likely to have the political capacity and resources to come together and get their streets blocked. We should empower more places to do so. Why should rich kids get the good version while poor kids get the sterile version?

My old neighborhood, Old Towne Orange, has enough wealth and social capital to get the streets shut down on Halloween.

3. Halloween destination neighborhoods are a big factor.

I think destination neighborhoods might be the most valid critique of my article. Social media is always abuzz with houses that have Disney-level decorations handing out full-size candy bars. These neighborhoods become legendary, so kids and parents want to visit.

I do see the example I used with Old Towne Orange that it is now a destination neighborhood, especially with some media coverage. Kids and families clearly come from across Southern California (see video above).

My guess, though, is that people going to destination neighborhoods are more often coming from neighborhoods that have stopped the tradition. As more households opt out of Halloween, the overall experience declines.

You end with a lone house in a neighborhood or street with their lights on for Oct. 31. Very few if any kids will go to a place like that. Instead, they are going to more wealthy destination neighborhoods.

It is communal. I see this scenario as more part of the broad social decline…

4. Trunk-or-Treat saves time and is easy for parents.

But trunk-or-treat saves time for busy parents! I get it, parents are tired and busy. This point only strengthens my broader social concern that I wrote about.

For the initial piece, I wanted to include something about Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2001)—the foundational treatise on the hollowing out of American communities. I didn’t have the space there, so I will discuss it here (it warrants a full post actually).

In his book, Putnam discusses how neighborhoods have grown more socially disconnected, with fewer block BBQ or neighborly drop-ins. There has been a long, incremental societal fraying, hence bowling alone rather than in a league with a neighbor.

“More and more of us commute from one suburb to another. More and more of our shopping is done in a megamall in yet a third suburb… we spend measurably more of every day shuttling alone in metal boxes among the vertices of our private triangles.” -Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (2001)

His insight from over two decades ago helps explain tired parents commuting from suburb to suburb today, basically endless driving because we have ruptured our town cores.

So instead of putting up decorations on the house that stay up all of October, parents simply toss an orange trash bag over the SUV bumper and line up for the 2-hour trunk-or-treat.

I also disagree with the notion that these things are easier. What is easier than an event on the very street where people live? Kids can literally walk next door. How is it easier to fight traffic and drive to some spot for the event? It just illustrates the broken places we’ve built.

It is pretty amazing what you can make with AI these days. My cover for Bowling Alone, Too: Trunk-or-Treating Alone in a Parking Lot.

I can probably guess a neighborhood that celebrates Halloween has more social networks or capital than those that do not. The rise of trunk-or-treat is just part of the broader manifestation of Bowling Alone.

5. Trunk-or-Treat is a supplement. It hasn’t replaced Trick-or-Treat.  

There was another claim that trick-or-treat is still alive and well, and trunk-or-treat is only a supplement. It’s hard to prove this one.

There are certainly more reports of trunk-or-treat events now. You can probably find a slew of them on your local community board. There are also articles on the downfall of trick-or-treating in large outlets, though admittedly the data is spotty.

In my own experience, my childhood neighborhood sees fewer trick-or-treaters now, with many people responding to my article with the same thought. Plus there are other social media posts wondering about this, too.

The supplement critique just doesn’t jibe with most experiences, nor even with that of the other critiques I’ve outlined.

We should not discount COVID here. The pandemic made people more concerned with germs, strangers, and crowds than ever before. Not to mention the dominant role of helicopter parenting (another future post).

Kids have less independence now. Parents got to see that trunk-or-treat is safe and controlled. It’s not a supplement, it’s now the holiday.

6. Who cares?

Finally, one of the more abrasive comments on my trick-or-treat take was: Who cares?

I have a simple answer: Me, parents, kids, Americans, people across the world.

The people around the world yearn to celebrate the American holiday, even getting arrested for wearing Halloween costumes in Shanghai.

We should care about our traditions. We should care about our dangerous streets. We should care about our shared cultural memories. We should care about parenting. We should care about childhood. We should care about our neighbors and neighborhoods.

We should care about trick-or-treating.