A halloween history

Present day: The most ridiculously exclusive part of donnybrook, which in itself is the swankiest part of town ever. This year we didn't get any trick or treaters since we live in an apartment, though I was half expecting to hear a rapping on my window before someone the dreaded sound "trick or treeeeeeeeaaaat". This is why I don't even answer the door when I'm on my own on a halloween, when I was a kid we had to sing, and we got money for it, not sweets. It was a good lesson for us too because it kept the "never accept sweets from people you don't know, or even from neighbours unless your parents are around" rule consistent. Accepting cash from strangers in exchange for a song was just fine I guess. The risks posed by "frere Jaques" fetishists was presumably much less than that of the candy distributing perverts.

The Donnybrook years. Before living in the ridiculously swanky spot I do now (though my being there is a sign that the times are a changin') I lived down near a big park, with ducks and everything. The first halloween we were there we were inundated with trick or treaters and we hadn't prepared for it at all. I think we had maybe a pack of rolos and those fizzy cola bottles jellies that metalrabbit had bought ages before but had abandoned since they made her sick and explosive. By the end of the evening we were giving the kids used pencils and blank CDs, and apologies.. lots of apologies.
The second year we prepared and spent a fortune on sweets. Then we sat down to watch some horror movies, switched off the lights and somewhere around midnight realised that we hadn't had a single visitor. We were having fun sized snickers bars for every meal for a week.

Rialto - the twin town to fallujah. For two years we lived in a house on a street where most of the houses were owned by a major criminal. I can't remember which one it was but he's dead now. It was the monk or the penguin I think. Note to the foreign: yes, our villains do have a certain batman style naming convention. The irish love a "chancer" (read: psychotic bastard) so we give them cute nicknames. If we were more accurate and called them things like "kiddie dope dealing, kneecap smashing c**t" then the cops might have a bit more support from the fine folks of Ireland.
Anyway, this lent the street a certain level of protection, no one was mad about throwing bricks through our windows in case the landlord was "the teddybear" or "Mr Fizziwig" and the vandal ended the day under three feet of cement. Most of the houses had bars on the windows anyway, including ours. Surprisingly the kids here were the best of any place I've ever lived. This came as a surprise after...

Finglas. About five years ago now I spent a while in Finglas with cartographer and a bunch of other non LJ folks. The average age of the kids who came trick or treating here seemed to be somewhere around 23 and seemed to define "trick" as hurling stones at the house and "treat" as hurling stones at the house. The highlight of halloween there was the "bonfire", or as most right thinking folks tended to refer to it: "the wildly out of control inferno made from old tyres and about thirty feet of discarded wood". Every day was like halloween in that place.