Me either. Until this year, that is. I’ll be honest with you. When my husband and I moved with our twins to a rural neighborhood—we’re talking farms with actual cows and cornfields—from Manhattan I still somehow envisioned a Halloween like the one I had as a kid. Running from house to house ringing doorbells as my pillowcase got heavier and heavier with my candy loot. And even as Halloween approached this year, it didn’t really occur to me that we don’t have sidewalks or even streetlights here, let alone many houses you can walk to with a three-year-old in tow. Then I read in the paper that “trunk-or-treating” would start at 7 p.m. sharp in the community center parking lot.
“What is trunk-or-treating?” I finally asked another neighborhood mom.
Turns out it’s a practical solution to living in an often impractical place. (I can say that because I drive 45 minutes to get to Target.) Here’s how it works. You decorate the trunk of your car with whatever Halloween theme you’ve got, put a big bowl of candy back there, costume your kids and trundle over to the parking lot of the local community center, church, or library hosting the event. You park where the nice people with the flashlights direct you and head inside so that your kids can run wild in an open space while the rest of the cars get situated. (This was key for me because my twins are just turning three and being in parking lots with them for more than a minute gives me gray hair and a hoarse voice.)
At the appointed hour the kids line up (sort of) and are released into the lot to go from car trunk to car trunk trick-or-treating. It’s fun and festive and super efficient. Even with the wandering tendencies of toddlers, my two little dinosaurs managed to collect quite a bit of loot in short order and we only treated our way across the first row of the 35 or so cars in attendance. Once the candy stock is completely depleted or, as in our case, the parents are able to con their kids with “All done!”, you head back inside for cider and donuts. No disappointing unanswered doorbells and minimal trudging for mom—I’m a convert. Trunk or treating is pretty cool. That said, I and my wee ones were a tad disappointed about the flip side of trunk-or-treating. Back home we lurked in the kitchen waiting fruitlessly for costumed treaters to appear. One lone treater eventually came… by mom-chauffeured car.
To avoid that future I will probably take the tykes for some traditional trick-or-treating next year. We’ll be among those “commuter treaters” who drive to “real” neighborhoods to infiltrate the nicely lit streets with the easily accessible homes on foot. If it happens to be yours, take pity on us!
