Yes, we do. We also have multiple churches here that give out candy and the city does a thing, I think at one of the parks in town. We still get a lot of kids. Most of them driven in from other neighborhoods. I usually buy quite a bit but this year I'm on a tighter budget so only bought one of those mega bags of mixed chocolate candies and a smaller peanut M & M bag, which someone has already broken into and eaten three fun size bags. Later in the week I may go to the Dollar Tree and pick up some gummy eyeballs. Those are fun to give out.

The trunk or treats have become more common here. We do still get kids on Halloween but not as many as some years ago. I’ve bought Snickers and Reese’s for years. DH likes any leftovers.☺️

I get about 100 kids every Halloween. I keep thinking I will turn the lights off that night and just be a curmudgeon, The kids are cute and usually polite. I live on a street of smaller houses surrounded by huge houses so all the kids come here.

I always make sure to bet Twix since thats what I like. Reese’s seem the most popular.

When I lived in the suburbs I got a ton of kids every year. When I moved to the town 40 years ago I loaded up on candy and got no one. We have a picket fence around the whole property and there are three doors so maybe they are confused about where to go. So I turn out the lights and leave till 8 o'clock. Curmudgeon that I am.

We'll only have maybe 12-15 max. A big change from our old neighborhood where I understand in recent years neighbors there have turned out the lights when numbers reached around 300.

I could not have afforded 300. Dh loves Halloween and has always bought full sized boxes of candy bars at Costco to treat the kids. Probably has to do with him growing up on a farm and never trick or treating himself. When we lived in that neighborhood we might have had 150 on a good weather year - our Halloweens aren't guaranteed not to be raining and storming.

I have some full sized hershey and other bars, then a box of the full sized M&Ms for the 'littles'. I just cannot hand a Hershey bar to a toddler! Although I will give them a candy bar to give to their Mom or Dad if they are old enough to understand. I try to avoid anything at all with nuts. We have a 2 and 4 yr old in the family with a nut allergy so I'm conscious of that.

We are just one block from a very busy and nice neighborhood, but the block to here is timbered and a little dark. And, it's a dead end street with no children living on it. We'll get a few and some family will bring children but not a busy or hectic night. Wish we had a few more, I know DH misses having the children at the door and seeing them dressed up and having fun.

Neither of us are much in the way of a candy eater. We'll occasionally eat the left over M&Ms. Any other candy bars will likely end up in Christmas stockings - I checked best by dates and still fresh in Dec 😊

I do not celebrate Halloween, candy or otherwise.

We get 9--40 trick R treaters. kinda hard to plan for as I do not want left over candy in the house. I have stocked up on packs of hot cocoa and granola bars.

Allergies are on the kiddies and not my problem. 25-30 years ago my sons best friend was diabetic. They went house to house even tho friend knew he could only eat a very limited amount of candy each day. And he never whined or demanded special treats. Curmudgeon? I like the decorations eld posted but think they would scare my 4 year old granddaughter.

For anyone looking for cute stuff that is Halloween themed, I saw these cookies today. Tollhouse M&M ghouls cookie dough. It has cute little teeny tiny bats and ghosts in it

https://www.verybestbaking.com/toll-house/products/mm-ghouls-mix-cookie-dough-bar-14-oz/

Our neighborhood is aging and since most don't participate and we are at the end of the street we don't get many kids these days. DH usually hands out the candy but this year we are thinking of opting out since he just isn't up to it and has back surgery scheduled in a few weeks. I get plenty of Halloween time. Last night I went to an amusement park with a friend that is Halloween themed this time of year. Today I was at a horse facility helping out. We're doing 2 weekends. It's really fun to engage with the kids up close and more personal. Several wanted their picture taken with me today. I even hijacked a "pony" for a photo op. I brought a bag of spider rings to give out to the littles.

Reeces pumpkins, full size, is all I would give out. We don't get more than a handful of tricks er treaters. This year I can't find them. The packages are all shrunk!!

You might see the odd pumpkin around town but nobody I know does anything for Halloween. I like it that way since the day has been relatively recently imported and hyped up by marketeers as a new way of selling tat imo.

This thread has been of interest to me to learn how others handle today’s Halloween tradition of kids going house to house for treats. It’s nice to know I’m not the odd man out with my approach - or lack thereof. We used to hand out candy until just after dark when we got tired of it & figured the littles should be back home. Our small neighborhood had a fair amount of kids & more that came from nearby rural areas. I never thought of myself as a curmudgeon but I never understood the growing fascination with the over the top yard decor for halloween that seems almost the norm now. Who has the storage space for all that giant blowup stuff & the energy to put it up & take it down? At retirement we moved to a new & even smaller neighborhood with fewer kids & we did hand out candy for the first couple years because of those kids & our familiarity with them. But, for the last handful of years, we turn all our lights out, still have no halloween themed outdoor decorations & ignore the holiday. If I had a trick or treat aged child I would not take them out for this but would participate in all the school, church & shopping mall events that offer safe & sane outlets for kids to celebrate the holiday by dressing up & eating too much candy.

As per usual we expect only 2 kids, our next door neighbors. Being out in the county where all homes are at least an acre+ apart it's too much walking to deal with so many parents drive their kids to more tightly packed neighborhoods to TorT. So we buy candy that we like :-)

I don't. In the past 30 years I have moved farther into rural areas. Lived in two places ....rather remote place when I lived on the bayou, but both have long driveways and gates.

So no point in buying candy to give out, and if I had candy around, I would just eat it myself, so I don't buy candy.

When I lived in small towns, yes, I did participate, and the candy I gave out were those miniature Hershey bars ... because that was my husband's favorite. I probably couldn't afford them now.

I don't get T or T'ers, so I don't buy candy. I used to keep $1 coins on hand for my just-in-case stash, but I can't get those any longer, so now I make sure I have some $1 bills or quarters on hand. I've never had to use them.

We get a scattered dozen or so at one place, few or none at the other. I'll be at the latter this year so I'll maybe get a bag or two of the kind of candy I like but only eat at Halloween time, just in case. ;-)

Until the last couple of years, we had no children who came to the house to trick or treat and very few even in our neighborhood. We are in a quiet rural area with lots of space between houses and our house is on a pricate road. We did host children for ‘haunted hayrides’ and DGD’s birthday parties when she was young. Her b’day and several of her friends all fell around Thanksgiving so she celebrated early so there weren’t so many parties around the same busy times. it was fun.

Now we have a family close by who are raising some younger children (we think some are foster kids) so we don’t know what to expect. We’ll be prepared just in case.

I have only had around half a dozen trick or treaters come to my house TOTAL in the 40+ years I've lived here. Not counting my grandson who lives a few miles away, but his dad always drove him here so I could see his costume. I just buy a few of his favorite candies for his bag and he can have the rest when he comes to visit. But alas, he's almost 15 so the tradition died a couple of years ago. I live at the end of a very long dead end road, almost all the houses are down driveways a ways from the road and not visible, so it's not an easy place to walk around in the dark. No streetlights, heavily forested. It could be perfectly spooky if there were kids in the neighborhood, but there are none now. I put a few decorations in the window and the porch because I do entertain friends regularly and my grandson comes quite often - I think he likes having it decorated.

Oly, keep decorating. Even teenagers (and adults) find happiness and comfort in familiarity. Small things like that matter. I remember my Grandparents on my mothers side had sky blue shag carpet in their "sitting room." Always. I and ALL of my siblings were a little upset when we were informed she was having the carpet replaced. She ended up going with the same shade of a non-shag carpet. Which was comforting for some reason. We only saw them for 1 week a year, during summer vacation, as they lived a 14 hour drive away. But it was the first thing we saw coming up from the garage when we arrived. The sky blue shag carpet on the stairs. And the Christmas decorations that she put up every single year for decades are treasured by her grandchildren. Not me specifically. But many of my cousins and siblings had VERY specific items to which they had attached memories they wanted to preserve. So keep it up.

Here in rural USA, Halloween is still enthusiastically celebrated. We live in a small town in what is seen as a ”good” neighborhood and have many T/Ts.

I keep track every year of our numbers and how much candy to buy. In 2023 we had 161 T/Ts and I bought 500 pieces of candy. Our first visitor came at 5:15 pm and we turn off our lights at 8 or when we run out of candy, whichever comes first. DH loves kids and really enjoys seeing the costumes.

Our town gives awards for yard decorations; it also sponsors a Trunk or Treat event along with several churches.

These Halloween haters made me sad. Did each of you go out each year after carefully, joyfully picking your costume, anticipating for days the fun spooky time it would be? Comes off awfully selfish that you can't now pay back the fun you reaped. How sad for these kids who go by house after house w/o their lights on. We have a specific window of time in our town. If I lived in one of the popular neighborhoods that attract 100s of kids from across town I would let my neighbors know come early as I will only be open until ______ candy is gone. I am a purist. I think kids should walk it. I think they should stick to their neighborhoods. I think one parent should escort while the other passes out candy at home.

arcy -- I echo your wishes, but you are picturing neighborhoods with homes close together and two-parent households -- where it's not a financial hardship to decorate or buy treats. Our 'out-laws' (DIL's parents) live in such an area of Chicago. Hundreds of children (500 +) come to partake of the Halloween bounty, and (most) people are able and happy to spend a lot of money on treats.

We live along a curbless, dimly lighted two lane road where lots range from half an acre to three or more acres and homes are set back from the road. People still decorate, but I'm giving up on expecting tricksters.

Halloween was the best day of the whole year when we had our house. We lived on a dead end street, and people from all over town would bring their kids so that they could trick-or-treat without having to worry about car traffic. I worked in the elementary school, so I knew so many of the kids, and my "old" kids used to come by too. We'd dress up our dachshund as a hot dog, of course, and I can still hear the cries of "There's the dachshund house!" Festivities began at 3PM, and by 5:30, said dachshund could barely stand up. We easily went through 25-30 bags of candy. Sometimes I had to beg some of my own kids' stuff, so we wouldn't run out. I am usually in a state of mourning on October 31 these days. Condo living brings no children to my door.

One more Halloween story to share, and then I will shut up. We lived walking distance from the elementary school. The children did not ever go home for lunch, except on Halloween, so that they could change into costumes for the 1PM Halloween parade and classroom parties to follow. Some kids were unable to go home because they needed a bus (not provided) or if their parents were unavailable because of work. I always asked my daughter's teacher if she knew who was staying in , and then I would call the mom and invite her child for lunch at my house. I usually had two or three. It always turned into a fun time, and I got such a kick out of helping the kids get ready. Excitement was in the air! As my DD2 grew, the numbers of lunch guests grew too. I found out that her classmates were asking their parents if they could stay at school, knowing that they would be coming to our house for lunch. I eventually wound up with double-digit ghosts and goblins, and I felt like the Pied Piper leading them all back to school for the afternoon fun. Fun times! Happy memories!

No kids stop here, bit we live near the top of a steep hill and no young children nearby. The first few year wr bought a bag, just in case someone came to the door but no luck

My son who lives about a mile from us gets several hundred trick or treaters. He lives in a vintage neighborhood where a lot of the residents go all out decorating. He buys enough for 200 kids; when he runs out, he turns off the light.

“Who has the storage space for all that giant blowup stuff & the energy to put it up & take it down?”

I’ve wondered about that, too. A few homes near us have so much stuff you can barely see the house. A couple days ago a woman on our local Nextdoor website said someone stole her $400 12-foot skeleton. I’ve also seen posts about thefts of the blowup stuff. Tacky as it is (IMO), it’s not inexpensive.

I remember the suburb days when my kids would go out 15 minutes before the starting time so they could situate themselves at the bottom of our development and work their way home with their pillowcases full of candy. They would run in , dump their loot on the family room floor and rush out again with the gang to do another part of the development. Little did they know that when I began to run out of candy I'd pilfer their piles.

“Who has the storage space for all that giant blowup stuff & the energy to put it up & take it down?”

OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO I DO I DO I DOOOOO!!

Teehee

I have huge 20 foot tall inflatable for Christmas. A santa, a snowman and a Christmas tree. But while my house is visible from the main road, it is on top of a hill, far on top of a hill in fact. So you see, I HAVE to have the huge decorations or people wouldn't SEE them!!! And they actually dont take up all that much storage space. All 3 of them, once deflated and folded, fit into a big storage tote. People make room for what makes them happy. I certainly do. As for it being tacky, well, they are 20 foot tall inflatables, no one who gets those (or 12 foot skeletons) is going for the subtle, elegant look. 😊

@amylou321 Your post made me laugh out loud! Love it! And, your home location on top of a very high hill makes the jumbo blow up decorations the perfect thing for you to have on display! I figured the storage sizes would be more like queen sized blow up air mattresses & take more space. I agree people make room for what makes them happy. For the record - I’m not the one who suggested they look tacky - and that was a reference to Halloween. I do like the Christmas holiday decorations blow ups & all of them - especially the lights. I do make storage space for some of those but I will admit to not having any blow up decorations. 😁

Did anyone out out a blue pumpkin? Did anyone get requests for treats for dogs? Did anyone have a child demand special treatment due to allergies?

None of that was seen last night in my neighborhood so I'm wondering about yours.