Tricks & Pranks
CANDY & TREATS | TRICKS & PRANKS
When kids are very young they say it as one word "trickortreat" with no understanding, other than the fact that if theywent up to a stranger's door on Halloween and say that magic word, they would walk away with a treat - usually candy. Eventually we learn that a trick should be pulled on some chump who was too stingy to stay home and give out candy all night. I remember watching kids throwing eggs at a house one year. I think they had a personal issue with the resident. But as for me, there were too many houses that DID have candy to worry about the few that didn't.
There was one run down old house that we always avoided, but for some reason, one Halloween, we decided to climb the fence behind this house as a shortcut to the next street. I could see an old lady peaking at us from an upstairs window behind a curtain. It wasn't particularly scary at the time, but what haunts me now about it, was our insensitivity to this poor old woman.
Don't know when it started, seems like it may have been a college thing first. I have a vague recollection of someone throwing a roll out a window from the high rises at UMass around 1971. But I do have a page of suggestions from our toilet paper website at tagyerit.com/xmb/ where several contributors describe their efforts to pull this prank.
College Prank reaps rewards ... 30 years later:
Sep 3, 2009 according to Reuters: The Madison, WI city council voted to
designate the plastic pink flamingo its official bird. In 1979, Univ of Wisconsin
students planted roughly 1,000 of the pink plastic birds outside the dean's
office.