Trick or Treat
On Friday, October 30, children in Des Moines will take place in a unique tradition. Beggar's Night, the night before Halloween, is common enough. Many cities designate the evening before October 31 as the day for dressing up in an effort to throw off vandals who spend Halloween sowing mischief. In fact, the practice is called Mischief Night in Philadelphia. Many cities call it Devil's Night. Detroit has coined it Hell Night, which barely distinguishes it from other evenings in the Motor City. Des Moines trick or treaters, however, not only celebrate a night early, but are compelled to tell jokes from door to door. This is extremely rare. Growing up here, I assumed this was a universal practice, it wasn't until I was in college before I learned that it is not, a revelation so shocking it was as if I was told that exchanging gifts on Christmas was an Iowa thing as well.
The trick or treat custom is ancient. Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote about citizens visiting their neighbors in costume 1800 years ago. Medieval Christians in Europe attached the idea to the night of Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, as a way to celebrate the souls of the dead who were said to roam the earth on that day. "Mummers" in costume (the name derives from the Old English word for silence and the ancient Greek word for mask) went from house to house asking for money and food for the souls. Shakespeare wrote about it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, accusing a character of whining "like a beggar at Hallowmas." The phrase "trick-or-treat" is a wholly New World concept, first coined in Canada in 1927, but it puts words to an idea that has underpinned the practice for thousands of years—that going door to door in costume is an act of extortion and intimidation.
"Trick-or-treat" is a threat. "Give me a treat," it says, "or else I will trick you"—traditionally by vandalizing your house, harming your garden or, in some cases, forcing you to smell our feet. In Des Moines 100 years ago, children would threaten "soaps or eats," offering the homeowner the option to avoid having their windows soaped in exchange for candy. In the late '30s, the city pushed the joke-telling exchange because vandalism was overtaxing the police department. During the war, the practice was promoted as part of the war effort. "Kids! -Don't Help the Axis on Halloween" the Des Moines Register screamed in 1942, as if the DMPD needed to on the ready in case the Luftwaffe arrived. Telling a joke for candy always seemed natural to me, it was the way you earned the treat. When I found out that freeloading children from other welfare states were simply given candy, I was incredulous. My indignation has historical precedent. In 1948, the Madison Square Boys Club in New York City carried a parade banner that read "American Boys Don't Beg." Now that I am on the other side of things, forced to fake laugh for amateur comedians that step all over jokes that aren't good in the first place, I'm not sure it's a marked improvement over vandalism.
Last year, Spider-Man was the most popular costume for boys and Elsa took the top spot for girls, which tells me that America has a bunch of basic-ass children. Nearly 10% of girls dress up as some kind of princess, 15% of boys are a superhero of any stripe. Surprisingly, traditional costumes like witches, ghosts, and vampires continue to make the top ten. If a vampire were to bite someone every day to turn them into a vampire, and each new vampire maintained a one-a-day biting pace, we'd all be vampires in about a month (this is, naturally, also true of zombies). The amount of witches that have been put to death is unknowable, some figures say the Inquisition did away with 9 million of them but that is highly unlikely. By the way, the Spanish Inquisition was required to give targets 30 days notice, which means that everyone expected them. It's likely that around 40,000 witches have been executed, the overwhelming majority by hanging. Very few were burned, which is still a pretty large number for a crime that doesn't exist. However, 75% of people arrested for witchcraft were acquitted, though the stigma (or stigmata) remained.
Speaking of devilish legal proceedings, perhaps my favorite American court case is United States ex rel. Gerarld Mayo v. Satan and His Staff, in which a Pittsburgh man sued the Prince of Darkness for causing "misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff's downfall." This case took place in 1971, by the way. The court threw the case out because the defendant, who declined to appear in court, is a foreign prince and could claim immunity. There is something very American about suing Satan and something even more American about ruling definitively that he isn't from here. This is the only case ever brought against Lucifer. There have been four suits filed against God.
British jurors were dismissed in a 1990s murder case for trying to commune with the victim via an Ouija Board, should you ever need an excuse to get out of jury duty. Stambovsky v. Ackley, a 1990 New York case, establishes that if you buy a house that you find to be haunted, you may rescind the sale. How you prove there is a ghost in your new house is frustratingly unclear.
This year, I'm sure that Beggar's Night activity in Des Moines will be muted and curtailed. Families worried about the coronavirus will limit exposure for safety reasons. The liberate crazies will forgo a costume-heavy holiday because they hate being told to wear masks. This is an understandable shame. As one of the few species that understands its own mortality, Halloween creates an appropriate outlet to celebrate, undermine and mock the macabre. Tying that behavior to humor in the form of telling jokes is natural, seeing how strangely alike are the physiology of laughing and grieving. We laugh in response to being scared, we laugh as a release of tension in scary situations. Why shouldn't we laugh (or pretend to) while keeping wicked souls at bay. So what was the joke that I told in my years as a trick or treater?
"What did Kermit the Frog say when Jim Henson died?"
"Nothing."
I was a pretty morbid kid.