Trick or treat origin: a Canadian phrase and a 1930s racket
“Trick or treat” is younger than most people think, and it did not start in the United States. The phrase first appears in Canadian newspapers around the end of the First World War, it spread across the American West in the 1930s, and only in the late 1940s and 1950s did it become a national custom. Older traditions of going door to door at Halloween certainly existed in Britain and Ireland, but the line from them to the modern doorstep is less direct than the usual story claims.
Souling, collecting and guising
Asking for food at the end of October is an old habit. Shakespeare already mentions someone who speaks “puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.” John Brand’s Popular Antiquities, in its 1853 edition, quotes an 18th-century note that on All Saints’ Day “the poor people in Staffordshire … go from parish to parish a souling, as they call it”, begging “for soul cakes, or any good thing to make them merry.” The same book records a Cheshire song sung “from door to door on the eve of All Souls’ Day”: “An apple or a pear, a plum or a cherry, Any good thing that will make us all merry.”
Brand also quotes an 18th-century account of Irish peasants on the eve of Samhain “going from house to house, collecting money, bread-cake, butter, cheese, eggs, &c. &c., for the feast”. And in Scotland, a 1923 article in the journal Folk-Lore on the Isle of Skye describes masked “guisers” at Hallowe’en with a warning attached: “If scones and cakes and apples are not left out, the guisers make a raid on anything they see.” That is very close to trick or treat in spirit.
Still, folklorists are careful about the link. Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center calls the souling theory “more or less conjectures or educated guesses”. He points out that no source has been found in which the people who started trick-or-treating in a community said they were influenced by souling, and that around 1910 American children “didn’t dress in raggedy costumes or go from house to house on Halloween.” Instead he points to a custom that was widespread in America just before trick-or-treating appeared, Thanksgiving masking, and calls the argument that it was the immediate source “convincing”.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?The phrase, from Canada
The words themselves turn up first on the Canadian prairies and in Ontario. The researcher Barry Popik found a 1917 report from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where “‘Tricks or treats’ you could hear the gangs call out”. By 4 November 1925 the Red Deer News in Alberta described children who went from house to house and, “in response to their time-honored threat of ‘trick or treat’”, were given “plentiful supplies of candy, peanuts, apples, etc.”
The quotation most often called the first comes two years later, from Blackie, Alberta. The Calgary Daily Herald of 3 November 1927 reported children who “wandered in droves from door to door, heavily disguised and demanding ‘trick or treat.’ To treat was to be untricked”.
A racket in the 1930s
In the United States the phrase spread through the 1930s, and newspapers described it in the language of gangsters. The historian Samira Kawash, in a 2011 study in the American Journal of Play, collected reports of children “employing modern shakedown methods” in Oregon in 1934 and of pranksters who were “bought off” in Washington in 1939. The Los Angeles Times in 1938 called it “the Halloween hijacking game”.
The threat was real enough: soaped windows, stolen gates, garbage cans on the porch. In November 1939 the magazine American Home offered a gentler answer to “the old, old festival that has become a somewhat rowdy night of gate-stealing, window-soaping, doorbell-ringing, and worse”: a table of cider, warm doughnuts, buttered popcorn and crisp apples for the “Trick-or-Treat-ers”.
It is often said that adults invented trick-or-treating to tame this vandalism. Kawash argues the opposite: her newspaper evidence suggests “children originated trick-or-treating and shaped it to their own ends.” Adults adapted to it.
Everywhere by the 1950s
Even in 1942 the phrase was still regional enough for a reader in Decatur, Illinois, to explain it in American Notes and Queries as “the local equivalent”. After the war that changed. Kawash writes that “by the late 1940s, trick-or-treating, alongside the parades and parties, was firmly established as an American custom,” and that during the 1950s it became “an important marketing opportunity for candy, snack, cereal, and beverage makers”.
The custom also gained a charitable side. According to UNICEF USA, in 1950 a Pennsylvania couple, Mary Emma and Clyde Allison, had local children collect coins instead of candy, raising $17 for UNICEF. Kawash adds that UNICEF began promoting the idea nationally in 1952.
So the costumed knock on the door has old relatives in Britain and Ireland. The words “trick or treat”, though, are a 20th-century North American invention, about a hundred years old. And if Kawash is right, it was children, not adults, who made the custom.