I was pulling a child's wagon. Running with it, actually, with two of my children, ages eight and six, loaded in the back. It was my exercise for the day. There were a lot of cars on the road, using the mechanical Jacobin to make more stops. I saw one couple in a golf cart with their kids riding where the golf bags go.
Halloween 2004.
Cars clog the roads and parents job their kids from house-to-house.
The reason: Adults are turning off their lights on Halloween, creating huge gaps between candy houses. It's not unusual to walk a whole block without seeing any houses that are giving out candy.
When I was a boy growing up in the 1970s, it was rare that you'd see a house with its lights off on Halloween. It's something you'd point to, as a freaky aberration that came with scary images: "Some old woman who chopped up her children must live there."
Today, I'd guess that most houses–60% maybe–keep their lights off. Some are legitimately out of town, gone to Florida early perhaps. Some are single-parent houses and the parent is with his/her kids and can't be home to hand-out candy (just a little snippet of the myriad of ways divorce affects everyone). Some are simply selfish parents: they both want the experience of taking their child trick-or-treating, so they turn off their light.
But many are home. All the lights are off, but you can see the blue glow of the television set in the living room window and the shadow of an individual in the feeble light.
Some of the people might just be too old to get to the door, but I suspect these are rare. I've seen cane-enabled people plop down at the front door with a bowl of candy, excited to see all the children. When I moved back to town as a young adult, I'd pick-up my grandma and her walker at her apartment just so she could watch kids run up my sidewalk in their costumes. Her friends were envious.
No, I believe most of the people are younger folks who simply aren't going to spend $4.00 on gum or take time to buy the candy. They're tuning out the nocturnal world of little kids doing what these two-hour recluses did when they were kids.
It's ironic. Halloween has been gaining huge ground in popularity and has become the second biggest annual bonanza for U.S. retailers that harvests $7 billion per year in exchange for candy, costumes, cards, and party supplies.
Yet at the same time, more people are turning off their lights.
There's a PhD dissertation in this somewhere.
