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What is the origin of the custom of 'trick or treat'?
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Courtesy riptheskull @ flickr Creative Commons
The custom of sending children door to door dressed in costume to beg for candy at night, also known as 'trick or treat', is a fairly recent one in the United States.
The term 'trick or treat' first appears in historical texts in 1939, and the practice didn't gain widespread popularity until well after that.
During the 1800's, Halloween celebrations in the U.S. were separated by gender and mostly applied to adolescents.
Girls stayed indoors and played games designed to help them contact the spirit world. Boys stayed outdoors where they played played highly ritualized pranks around the neighborhood.
Over the course of time, the pranks go rowdier and more troublesome, and communities began to look around for some other more positive way to celebrate the holiday. That's when 'trick or treating' was born.
The term 'Halloween' is a contraction of All Hallow's Even (as in, Hallow Eve, or Hallow 'een). All Hallow's Eve was an earlier attempt to rehabilitate a much older pagan holiday known in Britain as Samhain. (Pronounced sah-win).
Samhain was a late harvest feast when all the animals that a household or community could not afford to winter over were herded one at a time to slaughter. Often the slaughter would be done on a threshing floor, and the blood from the animals would mix with leftover grain laying about. That mixture would then be scraped off the floor and cooked into a kind of blood pudding.
To modern ears that all sounds pretty horrifying, but peasant people in pre-Christian times lived with death day in and day out and did not see it in the freakish, sensational way that we do today. Samhain was the time of year when the veil between life and death was considered to be the thinnest; when people could contact their deceased ancestors and ask them for help.
One Samhain custom involved the young men of the community performing ritualized mischief outdoors and then storming the gates of various households. The women stayed indoors, where they often asked the spirits of the dead to help them get through winter and help the next growing season be fruitful. Asking about who they would marry or asking for help with a marriage was also common.
Another common custom was to leave a bit of food on the porch for the fairy folk or nature spirits, and also to leave a meal at the table for the human spirits of the dead. It was believed that if such offerings were not made, the spirits would visit a bit of mischief (or worse) on the offending household.
When the Catholic Church came to Britain, it tried to Christianize all the pagan holidays and rituals instead of simply eliminating or forbidding them. Samhain became "All Soul's Day" or "All Hallow's Eve," and the tradition of leaving out food for spirits was reformed into sending children door to door to beg for 'soul cakes' as prayer offerings for the souls of the recently departed.
Mischief was not part of the Christianized version of Halloween, but it was hard to cleanse the holiday of this essential element. People who did not offer soul cakes could expect mischief to be done to their households, just like in pagan times.
Although the Church discouraged the outlandish pagan dress and costumes associated with spirit rituals on Samhain, the peasantry was also loathe to give this up and continued to dress colorfully for the door to door soul cake ritual.
In modern America, the mischief element remains as part of Halloween, despite attempts to rid the holiday of unpleasantness and danger. Knocking on someone's door and shouting "treat or treat" just doesn't cut it.
Today, some Christian sects consider Halloween to be evil and forbid the celebration of it in any way. Interestingly, many modern day pagans have resurrected Samhain, and now celebrate that holiday instead of Halloween.
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