A typical byproduct of our more-laws-are-the-only-solution culture.
When I lived in the city we got just about everyone on our block to agree that there would be a special bowl of treats for the groups who were obviously all high school age and up.
Circus peanuts and Bit O Honey.
See, there’s usually a no cops, no jail solution for most problems.
Very absurd. I get the anxiety parents face over letting their kids loose in the night to go trick or treating but thinking back to my childhood the Halloweens i went out with just my friends is very much some of my best memories growing up. Hell i’ve gone trick or treating as an adult for shits and giggles and i had a blast, i don’t see why some people have to be so pissy over others just having fun.
I think the last time i went trick or treating i was in my late 20’s or early 30’s, no regrets either. I had the best time. We did get a few people asking if we were too old and we replied with “And?”
This is another expression of the ever expanding post-9/11 securitization culture. There’s a wide-reaching societal belief that physical safety is more important than autonomy, or more specifically that issues of safety must always be presented in an emotional, politicized way. We see this everywhere and at various scales, from the banning of free-range children to the normalization and privatization of the surveillance state, from law and order rhetoric to the militarization of domestic police forces. I found a goodreads comment that lays out securitization theory pretty well, and looking at this through the lens of Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism is illuminating for our political moment.
Any 'side-eye’s we received were quickly overridden by squees about the puppy. Plus, we were all in full costume.
I was dressed as the Lab Rat from Portal, i even carried a companion cube plush and a mini-portal gun but no one got my costume. I don’t recall what my brother dressed up as but his friend was dressed as one of the characters from Gravity Falls.
We got plenty of confused looks but honestly idgaf. Hell i don’t even care about the candy, i just wanted to walk around the neighborhood, check out the cool decorations and other people’s costumes and spend time with my brother and his friend. But getting candy certainly does not hurt.
I think we have found fun city USA.
OK fuck this law. I wish I was 16 again so I could blatantly trick or treat in violation of this stupid law.
Larry David approves.
I can’t tell you how (and the laws seem mostly unenforceable), but I can tell you why they exist.
Halloween 1967 in this part of Virginia got way out of hand. There was the usual teenage rowdiness. Apparently a firecracker got thrown at a young child. And then there was the awful case of James Earl Brown, Jr., who stole another teenager’s candy and was promptly chased and stabbed to death with either an ice pick or a steak knife (depending on the source).
Contemporaneous national news coverage here: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DS19671101.2.10&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1
So while these laws are probably constitutionally questionable (and appear to have been enforced rarely, if ever, in recent years), we can kind of understand why Portsmouth and a bunch of nearby towns acted drastically after this incident 50 years ago. They had experienced a shocking murder of a child by a child, one which brought them unwelcome attention in the national press, and niceties like giving due consideration to everyone’s civil rights weren’t going to stop them from doing stuff that made them feel confident that this would never happen again.
I was mistaken for a 5th grader once at the age of 33, so I could have gotten away with trick-or-treating for ages.
Are those the kind of kids likely to obey local ordinances?
If 24 is too old to beg for candy in costume, I don’t wanna be right.
One of my favorite alien baddies are the Jarts in Greg Bear’s novel Eternity. Basically they wage a crusade to freeze, digitize and store everything and everyone they can so it can be preserved and transmitted to the end of time. They see this is a preserving, while their victims are less happy about it.
Everybody hates the lazy teens that show up long after the kiddies having fun have gone, but you know what? If you’re not trashing my place, and you’re going to go out and have some harmless fun with your friends just to sponge up some leftover candy, that’s all part of Halloween.
Plus, if you’ve geared up for the little ones with light up crap, and you unload some on the teens (like gummi light up rings etc…) they seriously become little kids, less jaded, and regain some of the halloween delight that they probably didn’t have when they wandered out of the house to grab some candy in jeans, a hoodie, and an old mask they had laying about.
Plus, you can haul out the really scary crap that would traumatize the little ones…
I actually love Bit o’ Honey. And black licorice. And circus peanuts, though gross not-so marshmallow texture, have that delightful “fake banana” flavor…
(something may be wrong with me)
Roger that; your taste buds may be defective.
I’ll take it. Being the household sponge for all the “nasty” candy has it’s advantages…
(no competition for the delicious black jellybeans!)
Anise is just wrong…
The weird thing that I didn’t know for like forever is that anise, fennel, and licorice root are all actually somewhat different flavors (not to mention star anise)… But they’re all tasty!
