Primeval terror (since 1929)

According to Skal, the "genteel" Victorian Halloween couldn't be more different from today's rowdy incarnation. The main tradition the Scots associated with the holiday was fortunetelling, used for the most part to predict who the participants were going to marry. In some ways, the Victorian Halloween resembled Valentine's Day. People stayed home and played divinatory games to glean information about future spouses. Putting two nuts in a fire to see if they jumped apart when they popped (signifying an impending break-up) was a practice Burns wrote about. Others involved a blindfolded person dipping his or her hand into one of three bowls of water, apple bobbing or a young woman peeling an apple in front of a mirror in order to glimpse the image of her future husband in the reflection. (Maybe that's the origin of the scary "Bloody Mary" game American children play by reciting the ghoulish Mary's name nine times in front of a mirror in a dark room, daring her to come and get them.)

The jack-o'-lantern, now an indispensable Halloween motif, didn't emerge until the first decade of the 20th century, although the Scots had a folk tradition of carving lanterns out of turnips -- a much harder job with a much smaller vegetable. Those lanterns were linked to a legendary figure named Jack who was so incorrigible that neither Heaven nor Hell would have him, and so he was condemned to walk the earth until Judgment Day, toting his turnip lamp. Like the Will-o-the-Wisp (aka marsh gas) he liked to use his lantern to lure passersby to their doom in swamps and bogs. He wasn't particularly linked to Halloween until the dawn of the 20th century, and no one seems to know how pumpkins came to replace turnips.

Hallowtide was occasionally associated with prankish antics on the part of young boys and men, but the custom of demanding food or money, what Rogers refers to as "enforced charity," was more common at Christmas. Recent histories of Christmas have detailed how many of the homebodyish Yuletide traditions we now embrace were cooked up by wealthy and middle-class citizens who were sick of being shaken down by the rowdy poor during the month of December. New York had an early 20th century street festival in which "ragamuffin" children dressed up in costumes and performed antics for shopkeepers and other affluent adults in exchange for money, but it was Thanksgiving, not Halloween. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, launched in 1924, spelled the end of the ragamuffin racket, but in their heyday the revelers filled Times Square.

As Christmas and Thanksgiving became cozy domestic holidays, it seems, all the mischief and misrule gravitated to the formerly homely Halloween. Both Rogers and Skal quote a late 19th century historian who lamented "the spirit of rowdyism" that "has in a measure superseded the kindly old customs" and the vandalism and racket generated by "gangs of hoodlums" in the streets. While many European cultures had a traditional "season of misrule" -- a festival in which the ordinary rules of decorum were overturned and figures of authority were mocked -- it usually happened in November or December as a prelude to the Christmas observances. Those rites sometimes involved costumes and processions (Rogers quotes a contemporary description of a troupe parading through the churchyards with "their Hobby horses and other monsters shirmishyng amongst the throng ... with such a confused noise that no man can heare his own voice"). By the 1920s, Halloween had become an occasion for adults to attend stylish (but still not macabre) masquerade parties and for children to wreak mischief.

Eventually Halloween pranks got so rambunctious that householders concocted the idea of bribing the miscreants to leave their property alone. A woman named Doris Hudson wrote an article for American Home magazine in 1939 that, according to Skal, is "the first time the expression 'trick or treat' is used in a mass-circulation periodical in the United States." (Cooper, who began hosting her Halloween open house in the midst of the Depression, said some of the "tiny lads" devoured their treats "with too much relish and nearly broke my heart." By all accounts, Depression-era pranking often took on the aspect of class war.)

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