Trick-or-Treating: From Soul Cakes to a Nation of Candies
The Oddest Bargain in the Calendar
Once a year, after dark, a stranger's child knocks at your door and makes a demand with a threat folded inside it. You are supposed to be pleased about this. You are also supposed to have spent money preparing for it, and to have left the porch light on so that the child knows which houses are fair game.
Trick-or-treating is the most familiar ritual of the modern autumn and also the strangest one: a negotiation between a householder and a small masked person who has no claim on your evening and nothing to sell. Almost everyone who answers the door plays along. The reason is that the bargain is not new. It is older than the phrase, older than the candy, older even than the name Halloween — itself a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the night before the Christian feast of All Saints. What we are watching at the door is an agreement struck at a threshold, in which a performance is offered and something is handed over in return.
A Cake for a Prayer
The first version of the deal had nothing to do with sweets. It was about the dead.
By the later Middle Ages, the Church had given the year two consecutive days for them: 1 November for all the saints, and 2 November, All Souls' Day, for everybody else who had died. In Britain and Ireland, the poor — and increasingly their children — went "souling" on those days, moving from door to door, singing, and offering to pray for the household's dead. The payment was a soul cake: small, round and spiced, closer to a biscuit than to a cake, made with oats and currants and flavoured with nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, with a cross marked on the top.
The theology behind the exchange was precise. In the medieval understanding, most of the dead were not yet in heaven; they were in purgatory, and the prayers of the living could shorten their stay there. A soul cake, then, was not charity dropped into a beggar's hand. It was wages. The visitor brought something the householder could not buy anywhere else, and was paid in food for it. It is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes the whole business is an American invention. "I'm sure that many assume Halloween traditions are pure Americanisms," says Dr Michael Carter, senior properties historian at English Heritage, "but in fact we know that the tradition of Souls Cakes in the British Isles is very old indeed!" A line from 1511 shows the custom already settled and slightly taken for granted: "we read in old time good people would on All Halloween Day bake bread and deal it for all Christian souls."
The soul cake is not extinct, either. English Heritage has revived it in recent years, baking soul cakes and handing them out at thirteen of its castles, abbeys and palaces to anyone who knocks after dark and says the words.
Songs Instead of Prayers
Farther north, and across the Irish Sea, the same night grew a different bargain — one that paid in entertainment rather than intercession.
In Scotland and Ireland, by the sixteenth century, children went "guising," a shortening of disguising. Dressed in old clothes, faces blackened or hidden behind a mask, they moved from house to house and did something for the people inside: a song, a joke, a poem, a story, a small piece of trickery. Scotland.org describes the old custom plainly — children "would dress up in old clothes to go 'guising' ... performing songs, jokes, stories, and tricks in return for gifts of fruit or nuts." The payment was apples and nuts, sometimes coins, sometimes a slice of the Hallowe'en cake with its ring, coin and button baked in, each trinket a small prophecy about who would marry and who would not.
Set the two customs side by side and the difference is instructive. Souling paid in prayer; guising paid in performance. In both, the person doing the work was the person with the least power in the room — a beggar, a child — and in both, the treat was not a gift. It was a fee.
But there was a third strand in the older night, without which the American version makes no sense at all. In Scotland the evening was also called "mischief night," because of the pranks that went with it, and those pranks had been recorded as far back as the 1700s. The asking and the mischief were not opposites. They were two halves of one evening, and the second half would grow much faster than the first.
The Trick Finds Its Name
In nineteenth-century America, Halloween belonged almost entirely to the second half.
The mischief was inventive before it was dangerous. Ropes were strung across dark sidewalks; doorknobs of facing apartments were tied together; swill barrels were overturned; windows were soaped and rattled. In 1887 pranksters coated the seats of a chapel with molasses. In 1894, two hundred boys in Washington, D.C., used bags of flour to attack well-dressed passengers on streetcars. As long as neighbours knew each other, the damage was tolerated with a guilty smile — rocking chairs hoisted onto rooftops, pigs let out of their sties.
Cities changed the arithmetic. In crowded early twentieth-century neighbourhoods, pranks hardened into something closer to vandalism: fire alarms pulled, bricks through shop windows, obscenities painted on the principal's house. And somewhere in that escalation, a sentence appeared that contains the entire future of the holiday. As the historian Lesley Bannatyne puts it, the children "begged for money or sweets, and threatened vandalism if they didn't receive them."
That is the ritual in embryo. The threat came first. The treat was invented to answer it.
The name for the thing arrived much later, and it arrived in the newspapers first. The etymologist Barry Popik traced the paper trail north of the border, and it is a Canadian story before it is an American one. In 1923 a Saskatchewan paper reported with satisfaction that "'Treats' not 'tricks' were the order of the evening." In 1924 the Red Deer Advocate in Alberta complained that when school and Memorial Hall were molested there was "no option for 'Treat or Trick.'" By 1927 the Calgary Daily Herald could describe the fully formed scene: the very young "wandering in droves from door to door, heavily disguised and demanding 'trick or treat'" — and could add the perfect closing line: "the youthful hold-up men soon returned home bowed down with treats."
The first printing found in the United States comes from Michigan in 1928, and it is still entirely a threat. The Bay City Times wrote of respectable citizens summoned to their front doors to hear the "fatal ultimatum 'Tricks or treats!'" uttered in a merciless tone by a small child who clutched, in one grubby fist, a chunk of soap capable of eliminating the transparency from any number of windows. The soap is the old world's mischief. The candy is the new world's peace treaty.
Historians are careful, though, not to make the lineage too neat. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Canada had a Christmas visiting custom called belsnickling, in which groups in costume went from house to house performing small tricks in exchange for food and drink — a practice that looks a great deal like trick-or-treating a century before the phrase existed. Lisa Morton, the author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, has suggested that the Halloween version may owe something to it. The threads are tangled, and no one can hand you a single point of origin. What is not in doubt is that by the late 1920s children on both sides of the border were already doing the thing, and the newspapers were already reaching for words to describe it.
The Treat Buys the Peace
Through the 1930s the phrase spread, helped along by the new mass media. The first American magazine articles describing trick-or-treating appeared in The American Home in the late 1930s, radio shows such as The Baby Snooks Show and family television like The Jack Benny Program put the script in front of a national audience, and in 1952 a Donald Duck cartoon titled Trick or Treat handed it to children wholesale.
The Second World War interrupted on two fronts at once. Sugar was rationed, which made candy scarce, and city governments were losing patience with the night altogether. In 1942 the Chicago City Council voted to abolish Halloween and replace it with a "Conservation Day"; the schools superintendent of Rochester, New York, made the case in a newspaper editorial: "Letting the air out of tires isn't fun anymore. It's sabotage. Soaping windows isn't fun this year. Your government needs soaps and greases for the war." Even ringing doorbells had lost its charm, he added, when it might wake a tired war worker.
What saved the night was not a campaign but a change in the landscape. After the war, American families moved into new suburbs, where houses stood at regular intervals along lit streets and the distance between one front door and the next was short enough for a small person in a costume to walk it. Individually wrapped, factory-sealed candy made the householder's side of the bargain effortless — no wrapping, no cutting, no plate of homemade fudge to be trusted or distrusted at a glance. A porch light left on said yes. A porch light switched off said no. A whole grammar of consent was encoded in a light switch, and by the 1950s the ritual had settled into the form it still has: costumes, candy, curbs, and a bowl by the door.
There was one more thing to be said for it. A child who is out collecting treats is a child who is not soaping windows. The treat was never only for the child.
The Grammar of the Doorstep
Watch the exchange closely and it turns out to be oddly formal, almost liturgical. The costume is the ticket of entry — it announces that this is a performance and not a robbery. The knock is the opening. The question is a threat that everyone present understands to be empty; children today rarely have any intention of carrying it out, and both parties know it. The bowl is the householder's answer. Then the child says thank you and goes down the steps to the next lit porch.
Not everyone finds it charming. One reader wrote to a newspaper in the 1940s to describe the practice accurately if unromantically: trick-or-treating is "obviously a mild kind of blackmail in which — whatever the motives — the treats are always forthcoming." He was right, and he was also describing something older than he knew. Every version of this night, for five hundred years, has been a small act of extortion, made polite by custom and settled in food.
New Trunks, Same Bargain
The ritual is still changing, and the newest forms are worth reading closely, because they show which parts of it people are willing to give up and which parts they insist on keeping.
Trunk-or-treating is the clearest example. Parents and guardians park their cars together in one lot, open and decorate the trunks, and children walk from car to car collecting candy — "Halloween tailgating," as it has been called. The custom is usually traced to churches in the 1990s, which presented it as a safer alternative to walking the streets. Early mentions date to 1994, when a newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, described an event at the Hilldale Baptist Church in Center Point, with a ball pit, a game room and prizes for children up through the sixth grade. By 2003 a Presbyterian church in South Carolina was holding its second annual version, with hot dogs for dinner, and the events have since spread to schools, YMCAs, courthouses and car dealerships. A child psychologist at the University at Albany, David Miller, told NPR that there is in fact little evidence that door-to-door trick-or-treating is dangerous — the poisoned-candy and razor-blade panics that began in the 1960s have been repeatedly debunked — though he allows that trunk-or-treat is a genuine improvement for families in rural areas where neighbours live miles apart.
The other new form answers a different problem. In 2014 the advocacy group Food Allergy Research & Education took a local idea national: households that display a teal-painted pumpkin — teal being the colour of food-allergy awareness — offer non-food treats such as stickers, glow sticks and bubbles alongside the candy, so that children with food allergies can make the same rounds as everybody else. It is a small adjustment, and a revealing one. Nobody proposing it suggested that children should stop knocking on doors.
What the Bowl Is For
This year, 31 October falls on a Saturday, which gives the ritual its widest stage of the week.
By then the decorations will have been up for weeks and the supermarkets will have been selling candy since September. Some of it will be eaten, some of it will sit in a bowl by a door until Christmas. It hardly matters. The thing being exchanged at the threshold was never really sugar. On the oldest version of this night, the treat bought a prayer for somebody's dead. Later it bought a song, a joke, a recitation, or a truce with a bar of soap. This month it will buy a costume, thirty seconds of a stranger's courage on a front step, and the pleasure of a door that opens.
That is still a bargain, and a good one. What has lasted a thousand years is not the candy. It is the fact that we keep answering the knock.
References
- Bannatyne, L. "When Halloween Was All Tricks and No Treats." Smithsonian Magazine, 27 October 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-halloween-was-all-tricks-no-treats-180966996/
- Encyclopædia Britannica. "Halloween." Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Halloween
- English Heritage. "No tricks, just treats: try a medieval soul cake as English Heritage castles stay open after dark." 27 October 2023. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/search-news/no-tricks-just-treats-try-a-medieval-soul-cake-as-english-heritage-castles-stay-open-after-dark/
- Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE). "Teal Pumpkin Project." https://www.foodallergy.org/our-initiatives/awareness-campaigns/teal-pumpkin-project
- Merriam-Webster. "'Trick or Treat': A History." https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/trick-or-treat-history
- Morton, L. (2012). Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. London: Reaktion Books.
- National Geographic. "The history of trick-or-treating, and how it became a Halloween tradition." By Emily Martin, updated 29 October 2024. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/the-history-of-trick-or-treating-and-how-it-became-a-halloween-tradition
- NPR. "What to know about trunk-or-treating, a trick-or-treating alternative." 31 October 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/31/1209559780/what-is-trunk-or-treat-halloween
- Scotland.org. "The Celtic roots of Hallowe'en." By Norry Wilson, 30 October 2019. https://www.scotland.org/inspiration/halloween-traditions
- Smithsonian Magazine. "The Celtic Origins of Trick-or-Treating." September/October 2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/celtic-origins-trick-treating-halloween-180984916/
- Smithsonian Magazine. "The History of Trick-or-Treating Goes Back Centuries." Updated 24 October 2023. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-history-of-trick-or-treating-goes-back-centuries-79408373/
This article continues the Halloween series. The previous chapter is The Irish Exodus and the Americanisation of Halloween. For the story behind the season, see Halloween – The Ancient Celtic Night That Conquered the Modern World and Samhain – The Celtic Feast Behind Halloween — or browse the Halloween collection.