The North side of Galesburg was inundated by trick-or-treaters; I believe there were hundreds. Not that I'm complaining; to me it's good that trick-or-treating is alive somewhere. The reasons it has died away, nationwide, I've put below, but it hasn't died away in our neighborhood. We ran out of candy, and so did many of our neighbors.
Of course most of the people you see out there are not our immediate neighbors. They come from the south side, the west side, the east side, and the countryside, all over, because they see our neighborhood, Broad at about Mary, as being lucrative in terms of hauling in candy. I can't really speak to how my neighbors feel about all this tourism; some are clearly into it and up to the challenge, having their houses totally decorated and even having a show out there. And some are doing full-length candy bars, too, which could run into some big money.
Overall I'd say the costumes were very creative. The balloon costumes, with the huge dinosaur and the alien carrying the kid, those are new to me. So are the lights going off in their face. Some were homemade. Some were barely thrown together at all. But people were mostly polite and they said "thank-you" and generally they refrained from taking a whole handful.
Here are the reasons it has gone down in so many places; it was never all that great in the countryside anyway (I suspect a lot of these kids were farm kids from the area). The first is much fewer children; this is especially true in the countryside. If you are the only kid out there and you need your parents to drive around on a busy highway, pulling over, that's no fun; a lot of times people will do that for their friends (who invite their kid over to trick or treat, and admire how cute he/she is), but it's no good for the older kids who want a better haul.
A few years back they had a razor-blade-in-the-apples-or-snickers scare, and this I think set it back considerably. The rumors were never proved true, not even once, but it didn't matter; if you sowed fear in the heart of the nation's parents, they'd no longer let their kids run free out on the streets after dark. In the big picture I think fear is playing a huge role here. I recognize some of the kids in the neighborhood already, but there are plenty that never get out to just play out on the streets like we used to. So it's no longer a matter of opening the door to kids you already know, like it used to be. A lot of these parents are just not letting their kids wander around unattended.
Finally, the churches started their whole trunk-or-treat programs. It was a response to the fear, really, but also a response to the idea that they didn't really like all the death and blood themes of Halloween anyway. They just figured, we can provide candy for our kids, and do it in an environment where we control some of the images that they see. Churches cut into the Halloween traffic simply by ensuring that lots and lots of kids got plenty of candy whether they went out in the evening or not. Downtowns and malls also had a kind of controlled trick-or-treat, but anything that cut down the neighborhood aspect of it was disrupting the holiday. Some whole towns have canceled trick-or-treating in favor of controlled parties or whatever; my experience is that everyone is still getting more than enough candy, but the essence of the holiday has changed considerably.
I have friend who bought five pounds of candy and spent the evening waiting, lucky to get one or two kids. We on the other hand bought ten pounds and ran out easily. It's a custom which by the way has moved across the pond where they've taken to it with gusto. But it's not really healthy here, because it's no longer a neighborhood thing, really. The neighborhood aspect of it was the best part, and, of the hundreds of trick-or-treaters we saw, probably only a few were from the neighborhood.
