Richard W. Jones: Our kinder, gentler Halloween is welcome

Halloween is much better than it used to be. Trust me on this. I’ve seen a lot of Halloweens, and, 60 years ago, there was a heftier dose of “trick” in trick-or-treat than there is now.

The night was divided into two parts in the Western Pennsylvania steel mill town where I grew up. The early evening belonged to the costumed preschoolers and elementary school kids. The late night was the territory of the juvenile delinquents.

The morning of Nov. 1 would reveal a scenescape scarred by Halloween tricks from the night before. Smashed jack-o’-lanterns littered sidewalks, streets and porches. One of the most common tricks was the soaping of windows. Young vandals would take bars of soap and rub them on windows. Most often, this was done to car windows and detached garages. It took a bold trespasser to soap a window or storm door of an occupied house, but that happened, too.

Soaping wasn’t so bad if it was done lightly. A driver could look past a few lines and swirls on a windshield on the way to work and clean off the soap when he or she came home. When the miscreants were serious about their work, however, they would coat an entire windshield in a thick layer of soap, requiring the driver to scrape it off with a razor blade. Unpopular neighbors, difficult teachers and people who had made enemies for one reason or another were at risk.

Stones occasionally were thrown against doors and garage windows broken. Serious, or at least semi-serious, stuff happened.

Such deeds, however, paled in comparison to Halloween conduct described by our parents and grandparents, who recounted how, when they were young, large firecrackers were tossed onto porches, outhouses were overturned and animals were sometimes abused.

It is difficult to understand how our more strait-laced society then was casually tolerant of this annual hooliganism. Today, it certainly isn’t, and I am happy about that. The norms of behavior have, in this case, changed for the better. Sociologists can explain it, I suppose.

Contemporary Halloween seems to be a more uniformly joyful event for children and adults. The trick-or-treaters at our door are invariably polite, and we are glad to see them. Like seven in 10 people, we prepare for and participate in the evening. We willingly spend our small share of the $10 billion that Americans lavish on the event, according to the National Retail Federation.

There remain small differences in how Halloween is celebrated regionally. When we moved for a time to northeastern Pennsylvania, we found there a delightful Halloween custom. Rather than simply holding out their bags for sugary loot, the kids would first sing a song, or recite a short poem, or tell a joke or pose a riddle. Once a neighbor boy breakdanced on our living room floor for his treats. We haven’t lived in Northeastern Pennsylvania for more than 25 years, and I wonder if they still do things like that.

In eastern Massachusetts, where our grandsons live, there is a tradition of “ghosting.” This involves preparing treats for a neighbor family, then sneaking up to their front door and leaving the treats on the porch. The final act is to ring the doorbell and run. Successful ghosting requires that the gift-givers get away without being recognized.

While 21st-century Halloween might not be marked exactly the same way everywhere, it does consistently seem to be kinder and gentler than the mid-20th-century version, a reminder that the good old days weren’t always better.