"Trick or Treat"
It’s Halloween again and, once more, I am mystified.
This is one holiday I just don’t get. All other holidays – from New Year’s to Christmas – have warm, fuzzy connotations. Valentine’s Day is hearts and flowers and love, Easter is about bunnies and new hats, Memorial and Labor Day honor heroes in the military and the labor force, (even Fourth of July tempers its fireworks and implication of martial violence with Mom’s apple pie).
But Halloween is about death and ghouls and horror. Magazine and newspaper ads are all about buying the scariest costume, the most frightening sounds to pipe into your front porch, candy that looks like bugs and guts. Driving around my neighborhood, I see homes decorated with spider webs and bats, lawns littered with caskets and tombstones, and trees festooned with skeletons and ghosts.;
Other aspects of the holiday baffle me as well. All year long children are sternly admonished not to speak to strangers, not to accept candy from them. And then one night parents drag their little ones to strange neighborhoods and instruct their kids to “go up and knock on that door and demand candy from whomever answers.”
But the biggest mystery of Halloween is its famous catch phrase: “Trick or treat.” Where did it come from and why is it backward?
The practice of dressing up in costumes on All Hallows Day (All Souls Day) and begging door to door for food or treats appears to have originated in Britain in the Middle Ages. And Shakespeare refers to the practice in Two Gentlemen of Verona when Speed accuses his master of “puling like a beggar at Hallowmas.” The earliest mention of “trick or treating” in the United States seems to be in the 1930’s, when newspapers reported the custom as a form of extortion – the cry, “Trick or treat,” was a threat from little goblins who, absent receiving the demanded treat, would then “trick” the hapless home owner with a prank.
All well and good. But the “trick or treat” syntax is wrong. It should be, “Treat or trick,” for that is the implied threat: Give us the candy or your house gets egged. But maybe that’s just me. As a writer, I edit everything I hear and read.
Not all is doom and gloom and incorrect syntax, however. There is an “upside” to Halloween, because at what other time of the year can you find Reese’s peanut butter cups (that now come with caramel filling, be still my heart) in gigantic 100-piece bags?
And now that I am reminded, I have to run to the store. My supply of Halloween candy seems to have run out, and the Treat or Trickers haven’t even come yet!
image source: www.maggiebyersprinzeles.com
Re: "Trick or Treat"
...about the trick or treat syntax...I don't think it is meant to make sense logically. Well, maybe it was a long time ago but my theory is that it is just spoken trick or treat because it is easier to SAY it that way round than treat or trick. To me it is a matter of sound, obviously.
Happy Helloween!
Steffi
PS: Those caramel-filled peanut butter cups sound like heaven!