Skip to main content

No more a Trick or Treat virgin

Until yesterday we had never been visited by Trick or Treaters. Never, ever. In our previous house we were simply too far off the beaten track for anyone to bother to come. (We didn't get Jehovah's Witnesses either.) And before we'd moved there, the practise was yet to be imported to these shores. Yes, just 13 years ago the idea simply didn't exist. We had apple bobbing and other Halloween activities - but Trick or Treating was an alien concept.

So last night we stocked up on sweets, prepared the high pressure hoses in case we had to fend off the more difficult brigade and waited.

In practice it was almost an anti-climax. We had six visits, all from very polite children under 11 in nice costumes with parents hovering on the pavement - just how Trick or Treat is supposed to be, rather than the teen destruction fest that it seems to be in some places.

I'm not saying it will always be like that. We might have been lucky. But for our first experience, it could have been a lot worse.

Image from Wikipedia
Labels:

Comments

  1. BooksPlease1 November 2009 at 18:26

    That is so cute. We haven't had any trick or treaters for years, although there are young children living in our lane. I don't know why they don't come out - it's all very low key around here. I've stopped stocking up on sweets, so I don't know what would happen if any did turn up!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown1 November 2009 at 18:45

    I don't know what happened this year but, unlike last year, we had only two lots of visitors - Haribo anyone?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cath@VWXYNot?1 November 2009 at 21:58

    The wave of trick or treating must have swept in from the North... my friends and I were going door to door dressed as witches and asking for sweets when I was about 7, so around 1984. Maybe because it was the only day of the year you'd get anything free out of a Yorkshireman!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Brian Clegg2 November 2009 at 09:23

    What was also fascinating was the degree of decoration of houses. Most had nothing. A few had pumpkins or lanterns. And one or two had gone the whole hog - one house had two full size coffins and few gravestones and the odd ghoul outside (though I think they had a party on).

    Interesting, Cath, that it was around in Yorkshire earlier - certainly in 1984 there was no sign of it where we lived. You might have a little party with apple bobbing and pumpkin carving, but there was no trick or treating. I think the first time I came across it was in (the movie) ET.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more