Trick or Treat Great Pumpkin

So it turns out Disney's Trick or Treat short cartoon, and the 1966 television special It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown saved tricks or treats!  Woohoo!  Or so says The History Channel, the prime depository of tabloid historical scholarship on the planet.  At least when it's discussing  history at all and not focusing on aliens who built Stonehenge or truck drivers in Alaska. 

Eh.  That's the approach to history that says 'How Napoleon's hemorrhoids changed history!'  Nonetheless, I'm sure if the two cartoons in question didn't single handedly save tricks or treats, they both reflected the spirit of the age and the fads and trends that were sweeping the country at that time.

Tricks or Treats, like Halloween itself, is one of those things that everyone insists has a 'real' origin story that nobody seems to agree upon.  That's because like Easter and Christmas, people have vested interests in seeing the historical paper trail a certain way.  True, Halloween has less importance than the other two holidays.  Nonetheless, every year you see something about how Halloween was the result of the evil Catholic Church stealing holidays from beautiful pagans, or that trick or treat was what evil Catholic types used to use to persecute true believing Christians (yeah, I actually saw a tract that said that).

Truth be told, we don't know the true origins.  We can guess.  Nobody said 'I Stephen do officially steal Halloween from the beautiful pagans on this, the 33 day of the 13th month of the year 932 CE.'  The most we can do is see what different cultures did, look at the time lines, see overarching developments, and say what developed and make guesses as to why. 

My parents mentioned the existence of tricks or treats when they were young.  But it was the Great Depression, and so people with extra funds to divvy out candies and treats were rare.  I think in their age the Halloween season seemed more the time to play jokes and tricks on people.  If their stories of the tricks they played were any indicator, the creativity that went into their endeavors dwarfed the efforts behind the most elaborate decoration displays today.  People must have been more tolerant of such shenanigans back then. 

In any even, by the 1950s, tricks or treats was definitely all the rage. Buoyed by the post-war economic boon and the explosion of a wealthy middle class, most of the tropes and traditions we think of came from that period.

It continued to be well beyond my childhood, and hasn't really stopped.  It has hit some bumps to be sure.  In the 1970s, you had all the stories about people killing kids with poisoned candy or razor blades in apples.  You also had older Americans becoming less and less tolerant of those troublesome kids, as the kids themselves become less and less respectful and more destructive. 

But it's still lasted, and even this year in 2020, it may still happen.  In our house, of course, these two cartoons are standard fare, marking the beginning of our last quarter Holiday Season.  So just for fun, and in keeping with the tradition of old blog posts of mine where I give my utterly valueless and amateur appraisal of this or that, here's a few things I like about these two particular specials.