Stuff You Should Know - Where Did Trick-Or-Treating Come From?

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

We aren’t exactly sure who invented trick-or-treating – kids who realized they could extort adults for candy, or adults who bought off kids in exchange for laying off pranks? The bigger question is: Will trick-or-treating survive the 21st century? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. There's Jerry, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the right before Halloween edition about trick-or-treaters. Yeah, and I've told my story before, but I'll just briefly summarize again that my house is after a big curve in the road, and people seem to just stop at that curve in the road. Well, they don't want to come up on Old Man Bryant's house. You know, the old dead oak tree with the big hole in it that Boo Radley hides figures in as kind of off-putting as right on your property.

And I think in my neighborhood too, they close, they literally close off. The cops close off two blocks. That's just this big square of streets, and that's the official sanctioned no-stress area where the parents all just walk around and get drunk, and all the kids just run around and don't have to worry about cars. So everyone in my neighborhood is congregated there. And you're outside of the comfort zone? Yeah, which I kind of miss.

I like trick-or-treaters coming to my house. I guess I could maybe try and move a few houses in, which I'm not going to do. You could casually move the roadblocks a little further back to include your house. Well, they're actual police cars with police officers, and I can't move them. Give them some toys. But I could put signs that like, this way for the best yet, and then you're like, only two more houses. Right, or like leave a trail of candy.

Because I remember when I first moved to Atlanta, we rented a house that got a lot of trick-or-treaters, and I loved it, man. I scared it the heck out of those kids. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a lot of fun. That was my first big adult giving out candy night, like the first time I've ever been able to do that, because we didn't have kids yet, so we weren't out trick-or-treating. And yeah, I made a really, I pumped music out, like the psycho theme and scary John

Carpenter stuff. Sure. I really enjoyed it. Did you do anything to overtly scare them? Oh, yes. I was dressed up as a very scary person, and I would jump out and scare them over and over and over. Did you really jump out?

Mm-hmm. Good for you, Chuck. Or I would stand, and Emily would be giving out candy, and I would just be in the darkened house, like eight feet behind her, just standing there motionless. That's always a nice attack. Nice. But point is, I sort of feel like we're missing out. We certainly enjoy taking our daughter out, but I really wish we had kids that came by.

Yeah, I wish you did too. It's too bad. Yeah. A stupid house right there near the main road. So close yet so far away. So far away. Yeah. And that's your forever house too, huh?

Yeah. No trick-or-treaters ever again for you. I'm walked in there. But what we could do is, you know, we could go to a friend's house, and jump on their coattails. You can't sit on their couch, you have to take your shoes off in their house, you can't be comfortable. We've long talked, me and my friend Eddie and Allison, you know them about, they have

a good backyard, about doing like a haunted trail one year, that like if you come trick-or-treating, you got to go through the trail first. It sounds like a lot of work. It is, and it would be fun. No, I mean for the kids who have to go through the trail. Kind of earn. Which way? You got to earn that free candy.

Earn that Reese's Pieces. So we just hit upon like 15 different themes in this episode, if you'll, if you'll agree. Do you agree? Yes. So we're talking about trick-or-treating here. And if you look at the thing on its face, just the words, trick or treat, there seems to be some sort of option here. You can do one or the other.

There used to be. Give me a treat, or you get a trick basically was the equation. Right. Yeah. They should just change the name now to just treat night. Treat night. Right. Exactly.

We aren't 100% sure on where trick-or-treating came from, but what we do know is that it was originated in America in the 20th century, and that there was this really like brief golden age where it lived up to its name, trick or treat. There was a, there was an offer to not get pranked or tricked. And if you didn't take the people up on the offer, the kids up on the offer by giving them candy, you got pranked. That was the equation. It was in the name.

Everybody knew the score. And then it slowly kind of moved over to what we understand today where the police set up roadblocks and everything is safe. These kids these days. And it's just kind of, just like you said, just the treat side of the equation. Yeah. I was, of course, kidding, but we'll get to it. There are people that really do decry this new generation of children who just expect

handouts and that it leads to the idea of the welfare state. Right. And all this other garbage that I have no patience for. Sure. Because it's just a fun thing for kids. Yeah. Or do you think they should be earning the stuff? No, no, no.

I don't feel that way. I do feel, well, I think it'll come through loud and clear as we do the episode. All right. Well, we should jump back a little bit to the origins of Halloween. We've gone over this before and episodes pass, but we all know it originally started as a pagan harvest or not just one, but pagan harvest festivals in general among the Celts over in the UK. Yes.

And that evolved into Halloween, but it had nothing to do with trick-or-treating at the time. No, it wasn't wrong. Again, trick-or-treating is a 100% American invention. That's right. And so with Halloween in particular, you've got all these different components for the modern Halloween for trick-or-treating. You have going from house to house.

You have getting to said house and asking for a treat, basically sanctioned begging. You got your costume. Costume dressing up, being outside, kind of parading around. All of these things find their origin in the Celtic and I think specifically Gaelic harvest festivals that introduced the dark half of the year. That's right. And in particular, there was Samhain, which forever I've always said Samhain because that's how it's spelled.

Now, you said Samhain right when we did our Halloween episode, didn't you? Probably. By the way, speaking of Samhain, you realize that I went to New York and saw the Misfits on Saturday. Oh yeah. How was that? It was great. Colossally amazing.

This is the original Misfits, right? The original Misfits. Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only, Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein, who actually specifically invited us to this. Yeah. Stuff you should know, right? Yes. To this show.

That's amazing. It really rocks off. Didn't the dammed play as well? The dammed opened and then rancid and then the Misfits just tore the roof off the sucker. When I saw you were going, I looked up some YouTube clips of this tour and it looked pretty amazing. It was amazing. And I think Glenn Danzig said that was their last one ever.

Oh really? And so we got to see it. Wow. Yeah, you mean I went, had a great time. Amazing. So big, big thanks to Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein for the invite. The stage set up looked great. It was just a really cool show and they played almost everything.

It was just a really good show. That's fantastic. So anyway, back to that one. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a perfect time to mention that show though. Yeah. It all worked out. It did.

Hallow's Eve was the night considered when the veil between the living and the dead was the shortest. And so that's when Halloween formed. Right, right. So people would dress up in like modern-day Ireland, Scotland, I believe Wales, the Isle of Man. They would dress up like demons or fairies or supernatural characters who were, because this veil was so thin between the living and the dead or the supernatural, they could

cross over. The creatures could cross over and communicate. So if you dressed up like them, maybe they would be confused and think you're one of them and leave you alone. That's right. That's why we've got the costume thing going, right? That's right. And part of that was the community getting together, getting drunk on probably high-octane

mead and stuff like that. And they would parade through the town. They saw Halloween parades all over the place. Right. Here in Atlanta, we have one of the best in Little Five Points. Yeah. The Halloween parade, fantastic. Like when you think about the Halloween parade at your town, that is centuries, millennia

old that tradition is. So, we have those two things going on. And then the one missing piece is, knock, knock, hey, give me candy. But this we have the origins of, which came, and it's still not Halloween. It took American kids to put all this stuff together. But the European tradition of souling, which was when kids on Hallows Eve would go from house to house and pray for the souls of the departed and in exchange, you would get a soul cake.

Yeah. Which I looked up. They looked pretty good. What is it? Just a little baked good? It looks like a muffin top. Like top of the muffin to you. Oh.

It looks really good. Soul cakes. Or mumming, which is, and this sounds fantastic, I wish the kids still had to do this stuff. You would have to perform a short musical number or some kind of performance to get a treat of some kind. Right. Or maybe a little spare change. Right.

You have going to house to house and getting something from the owners of the house, like a treat or something like that. That's right. But there was a reason for that, praying for the soul of their departed loved one, doing a little dance number, something like that. The prank part, the prank part of the equation, that also existed before trick or treating too. And in fact, that was kind of the origin or the biggest tradition of Halloween itself

was pranking. Yeah. And that came from Ireland. Is that right? Yeah. Usually in the 1880s, they would just run around doing pranks and then they would blame those fairies or demons on Samhain for the mischief that it wasn't us, it was the fairies. On Samhain?

Right. I mean, it sounds, that's how it's spelled. Yeah. It's really, that's a confounding pronunciation. It is. But there you have it. That's right. And then pranks back then, and of course, were pretty low-key ding-dong ditch, stuff

like that, moving the neighbor's furniture to the roof. I saw that. Yeah. Like flowerpot on the chimney. Sure. But it would also get way, way worse than that. Yeah. I looked up mischief night.

We never did that in Georgia. No. Lord Devil's night, it was also called? Yeah. Which is the night before Halloween when all these pranks would happen. Region to region is called different. Apparently in New Jersey, it's mischief night. Or cabbage night or something?

Well, in Camden, New Jersey, it's mischief night. Other parts of New Jersey call it cabbage night. Cincinnati calls it damage night. That's pretty overt. That's a punk band name right there. Damage night? Yeah. Totally.

Insurance deductible night. Other part, I don't know why Ohio is so highly represented here. Beggar's night is something else they called it in Ohio. Check because there's nothing else to do in Ohio, but sit around and wait for that night. For Hallows Eve. Other names, doorbell night, trick night, corn night, tic-tac night, goosey night, and then in Canada, gate night or mat night if you're in Quebec, MAT. They would steal the gate off your fence or the mat from your doorstep and remove it.

So they're pretty on the nose, especially damage night. But Devil's night in Detroit, it became legendary over about a 20-year period in the 70s. And through the mid-90s, I saw before they finally got a little bit of a, could put a dent in it by forming Angel's night. Yeah. They kind of rebranded it. Well not rebranded. The Angels were volunteers who would walk around to keep kids from setting everything

on fire. Oh, okay. Because that's what they did on Devil's night. It was a night of arson. It was a night of arson. I thought that it ran, of course, because they burned all the buildings down in Detroit and there was nothing else left. That was a real problem though.

I looked into it and hundreds of kids, like in 1994, I think there were like 315 kids arrested for Devil's night. Fires and other stuff. In 1984, the peak of Devil's night in Detroit, there were 810 cases of arson in one night in Detroit. They would just set the city on fire. And I'm sure some of these were bags of poop on a doorstep, which I think we can all agree is harmless fun.

That is unless you're the steppy. I never did any of this stuff. I never rolled a house. Oh, you didn't? No. That was fun. I'm so mad. I was so busy being good.

It's never too late, buddy. I know. I should roll a house or fork a yard. I don't know what that is. The plastic forks just basically get like 2,000 plastic forks and stick them in the yard. Oh really? I've never heard of that one. You never did that?

I'll really chew up a lawn mower. I never egged a house because I always heard that that really damages paint. Yeah. But we did have the junior-senior egg fight every year. That was kind of fun. When you go, you've got something going on. We get together in a field and throw eggs at each other. Aside from wasting a lot of eggs with well eggs, yes, but also toilet paper, you really

should roll somebody's house at least once in your life. It's great. Is it? Yeah. All right. I'm going to roll your condo. I remember when I was a kid actually, my friend and I rolled the neighbor's house, but we had to be in early so we were doing it basically in broad daylight, it was dusk at best.

And the cop drove by, which never happened in our neighborhood, ever, never, the cops just weren't needed. It was just, I think we talked about in the free range episode, parents episode, you could just do whatever. We had to knock out of the house of the neighbor whose house we just rolled to let us in to hide from the cop. Oh wow. She went out and told the cop, it's fine, don't worry about it.

We rolled her house and had to get safe harbor from her. Yeah. And you can't really clean up a rolled house, can you? You can and I have if they come tell your parents what you did. How do you do it? The rain makes it way worse. Yeah, but I mean, you can't climb up there, can you? Right.

Some of it's inevitably stuck up there, but you can pull it down as gingerly as you can to get as much as you can, but no, some's going to be left over. All right. I'm going to roll a house. Okay. Just know whose house you're rolling. Like you don't want to get shot at or anything like that. I don't see that anymore either.

I feel like it, I mean, I don't live in the suburbs. Maybe it's a little more prone to happen there, but it seems like a lost art. If very well, maybe I don't know anybody who rolls. I just assumed it was because we'd outgrown it, you know, Emily called it TPing a house. Yep. That's Ohio. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Let's take a break. We barely talked about this. I think we're one page in. Good. That's great. All right. All right.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So to recap, Chuck, we have the costumes in play now. We have being out on Halloween night, sometimes parading drunkenly community. We have going from house to house and we have the prank factor.

That's right. All of these things are out there floating around, have been out there for centuries, millennia by the time America is born and makes it to the 20th century. And at some point, some kids said, we think, Hey, you know what, we could pull all this together and turn it into something really amazing and peculiar and unique called trick-or-treating. That's right. It's a great piece from a sociologist named Samira Kawash called gangsters, pranksters and trick-or-treating 1930 to 1960.

And is this that pure period that you were talking about where she thinks that American kids just created this thing? Yeah. There's two historical views because we don't know where it came from. One historical view, and I think this is what Kawash believes too, is that it was actually kids who figured this out. Which is great. Who said, we can extort adults to not prank them if they give us treats.

And that it was a genuinely a kid invention of kids. They made it up. And there's some evidence for that kind of thing. A lot of the early newspaper accounts of it kind of call the kids gangsters and say they're extorting people. It's also possible that it was like written super tongue-in-cheek and that it was kind of dry and lost to the ages. The other historical view is that the kids were out pranking and doing the pranks.

And it was the adults that introduced treats into the equation to buy them off to keep them from pranking. Right. Los Angeles possibly is the point of origin. And this one, wealthy kids, I guess that makes sense that this would be the idea of kids of privilege. Sure. You know, like come around and give me stuff.

But apparently in Los Angeles, kids in the wealthy parts of town would dress up and their parents would take them around from house to house. And this is that pre-1930 period though. Yeah. They think sometime in the 20s. And if you think about it, that really resembles what we do today. But in between that origin and where we've arrived today, there was this pure period, 1930 to 1960.

Some people might even take it a little further beyond that, where the kids seem to have run the show and there really was both sides of the equation, a trick or a treat. Right. But that term actually was in 1927 in an article, right? It's at the first time they found the two words in print together, I guess three words. That was in an article about a town called Blackie in Alberta, Canada. And it seems like all of it was sort of on the west coast early on. Yeah.

And again, they think possibly it did originate in Los Angeles or it may have originated in multiple towns on the west coast roughly at the same time. But we're thinking 20s because in 1919, there was a book by Ruth Edna called... Ruth Edna Kelly. Ruth Edna Kelly called The Book of Halloween and it didn't mention any kind of trick or treating in there. No. And it's like an exhaustive, comprehensive, homemaker's overview.

Yes. It would have been in there. Right. For sure. And you got to think like poor Ruth Edna Kelly is like, gosh, if I just waited like two years to put this book out, they're going to come up with something brand new with Halloween two years after I come up with this book. I wrote the book on it.

Right. Not quite. Now it's out of date. But they did find mentions of it in newspapers out west, Portland, Washington, Reno, Nevada, Helena, Montana. Yeah. And you can kind of track its progress from the dates and mentions in this newspaper articles. Yeah.

From west to east. Right. Yeah. So there's those two sides. One say that it was kids who came up with it on their own. Perhaps they were introduced with the idea of going from house to house to get treats in Los Angeles. But then they said, well, we're also doing these prankings.

Maybe we can say, hey, we won't prank you if you give us a treat. Right. There's that view. The other view again is that it was adults who said, whoa, kids, we don't want you setting fires any longer, derailing streetcars, because every once in a while somebody would die. People would get shot at by angry neighbors. Sometimes somebody would be in one of those buildings that they set on fire and they die. People would die in a building that kids set on fire as a Halloween prank.

So for the most part, though, it was just kind of tolerated as one night a year when the kids basically had power and were allowed to run the show. So this idea, this other historical view that adults finally said, hey, you know, we're not going to just say you can't do pranking. They'll probably be a bad thing. But why don't we just start having parties on Halloween night while you're out pranking, and there'll be cider and donuts, and you can come inside and bob for apples and maybe do that instead of running around pranking the neighborhood.

And once you did do that, you went from, and this is Samira Kawash putting it, like you, under the rules of society, you went from this powerful kid who could levy a prank on you if he or she wanted to, to a house guest of the adult who now had you in and had given you donuts and cider, you're really going to set their house on fire as a prank after that? Of course not. No, you're not going to. So in this sense, trick or treating was something the adults introduced to keep kids from carrying

out these pranks. Yeah. And it was, by the time World War II came around, it was a big thing in the 1940s. But of course, with the sugar rationing and just the fact that there was World War II going on, it put a dent in it for a little while, but it came back bigger than it ever had been after the war. And I mean, seriously, it came very close to dying out from World War II. Sure.

It was pretty new. It hadn't gained that much traction. There were a lot of cranks and grumps who were not happy about this kind of thing. I'm curious what else had died in the war and never came back. There's got to be lots of little things. That's a great question. Let's look it up. There were a couple of big pop culture sort of tent poles that helped Halloween along.

Charles Schultz's Peanuts, of course. It wasn't the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown yet. That was the 60s, I think. Yeah. But in 1951, he had a four-day comic strip run around Halloween where the Peanuts gang got already and got their costumes going, and that really brought it to the forefront. And then Donald Duck, it was a cartoon, Donald Duck trick-or-treat a year after that that had Donald working with his nephews or trying to prank his nephews while they were trick-or-treating

and working with the witch. And then the candy companies get involved. There was also a very famous costume company called Ben Cooper Costumes. Yeah, they're the ones who did the cheap plastic mask and a vinyl smock. But they had this really great talent of identifying what was going to be like a pop culture phenomenon before it ever blew up, so they get the rights for cheap. But they were also making these things like 10 months before. So they really had to have foresight, and they were really good at it.

But the fact that you could get cheap, amazing costumes that the little kids all wanted of their favorite characters, that definitely helped things along, too. Yeah, it's hard to overstate how big of a deal it was to a kid to be the certain whatever they wanted to be. I think it's still that way. I'm sure it is. But now it's a lot easier, I think, to buy costumes. I think when you and I were kids, there was a lot of fashioning costumes.

When you didn't have the ability to be the alien from alien. It was a lot harder to put together these elaborate costumes. But once you got your heart set on it, you had to. So I'm going to tell you my best costume, then you tell me yours, okay? My mom made one from scratch. Clown, which is a clown costume. But the big kicker was that it was an upside down clown walking on his hands. So my feet were the clown's hands, his head is dangling between my legs.

I've got his legs sticking up off of my shoulders, and I don't remember, my head must have been covered up like I was in his butt or something like that. But I was an upside down walking clown. Greatest costume ever. Really? Yeah. Got any pictures? Somewhere, yeah.

I did a lot of funny ones. My brother and I were Hansa, Lo and Luke Skywalker when I was really little. But then I got into like, I was always wanting to do funny characters I like. Like Ed Grimly one year, the Saturday Night Live character. I did Ed Grimly one year, and I was, I don't know, I felt like I was always trying to make people laugh. I never did scary stuff. Until little kids started coming around and trick-or-treating me at your house.

Yes. Then you started to scare me. Or like movie characters. Like even into my adult years, you know, I would try and find some cool movie character like H.I. from Raising Arizona. I did one year. That's almost Ed Grimly. Same hair.

No, not the same at all, actually. And then one year I did a great, I actually won a contest in New Jersey one year when I was a hearty Kushna, and I like shaved my head, I did the whole thing. Wow. I had literature I passed out. Wow. Made the whole deal. You just ended up joining a local chapter?

For a little while. It was fine. Really got into the role. But I haven't, it's been a few years since I've dressed up. Yeah, same here. Because I just. Oh, that's not true. I haven't been to a Halloween party in probably five years.

Right. What were you last year? It was Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. So you were you, but with a tie. Right, exactly. And like a giant inflatable brick cell phone. And Yumi was a specific Michael Jackson, a moment of Michael Jackson's history where he's holding blanket over the balcony.

Oh, sure. And Momo was blanket. You can see it on Instagram. That's great. I have to check that out. All right. So the candy company started getting involved is where I left off. And the costume company.

They knew it was gold for them. Mars Incorporated in the early 1950s were doing ad campaigns on TV and in newspapers and on the radio and stuff about trick-or-treat. It became a thing with UNICEF. They had a trick-or-treat for UNICEF campaign back then. I think they still might. You know, I'm talking about the little boxes that holds change. And they would just give them to little kids and while they were out trick-or-treating

and they'd also asked for change for UNICEF to help needy kids overseas. And that actually went a really long way to legitimizing trick-or-treating. Yeah. They're doing a lot these days too for kids, special needs kids. Like it's taken this long to finally get the word out. Like the blue pumpkins, have you heard of those? If you trick-or-treat with a blue pumpkin, that means that you have some sort of special need where you may not be able to walk to a front door and say, trick-or-treat, I'm

dressed as, you know, Michigan J. Bullfrog. What? That'd be a great costume. It would be, but did you pull that off of... I just made... Yeah. Wow. Nice.

He's been on my mind lately. I guess so. But so people know like, oh, you've got a blue pumpkin. So I shouldn't say like, you know, come on, kid. Why don't you tell me what your costume is? And it's good though, like it's taken, it's ironic that it's taken this long to get parents on board to the fact that some kids need, you know, different kinds of treatment. I don't know if ironic is the best word as much as disappointing is.

Yeah. You know? You're probably right. Should we take another break? Oh my God. We're going to have to take three more. No, we're not. Okay.

Yes, we will then. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Did you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right.

So I think basically what we were saying when we left off, it's sorry about the nostalgia here everybody, but I mean, come on. You get us in a room around Halloween. It's going to happen. So by the early fifties, trick or treating was huge and established and had. So if 1930 to 1960 was the heyday, the golden age of trick or treating, 1950 to 1959 was the salad days of the, the heyday. Right.

And when did people start complaining about it? The seventies? No. And eighties? No. They were the twenties. Oh, really? Yeah.

Because those newspaper articles that you can track the progress of Halloween, more often than not, they were like old cranks complaining about how they didn't want to have to give tricks or treats or whatever to little kids. Right. Don't you blackmail me. They don't. Yeah, exactly. You know, what are we teaching our kids?

And there's actually, if you kind of scratch beneath the surface of trick or treating, but first it appears to be kind of a, a weird power struggle between kids and adults. And it definitely is that. But there's also another power struggle going on between adults of two different minds. One to like, you are over parenting by being upset about this or like this is just one night a year. It's good for kids. And other people are saying like, this is terrible for kids, allowing them to go from

house to house to beg is just a bad idea. It's unsafe is another way to put it too. So there's like a struggle weirdly over trick or treating and it has to do with under parenting and over parenting and that conversation about the whole thing. I have seen parents ruin kids experiences, whether it's like a Easter egg hunt or trick or treating. I've seen this in action. Because they're too involved.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what it comes down to is just how involved are you in your kids trick or treating for a very brief period. There was very little involvement in kids trick or treating. And a lot of people say that's actually really good for kids in this other way that we've kind of started to evolve toward is not. Yeah.

I don't remember my parents taking me around trick or treating. I'm sure that happened maybe when I was really little and we certainly would have had to go somewhere else because you know, I've lived on the dirt road with no neighbors. Or very few of them. But I just, all of my memories stem from being like probably 10 to 15 and being completely on my own with my friends. 10 to 15? 10 years old.

But to 15. That's pretty late. Yeah. What, to trick or treat? Oh yeah. Oh, now we trick or treated up until probably like the 9th or 10th grade. Well, we'll get to it, but in some places you get to get arrested for that. When did you stop?

You could still trick or treat if they would let you. I think I stopped around 13. Maybe 15 was too late. Maybe 13 or 14. You're fine. No, 15's great. Go with God. No, but you're probably right now that I'll look back at.

Maybe I went to Halloween parties, but maybe not trick or treating. There's kind of an unofficial slash official again in some places cut off after 12. Really? Done. Yeah, because 13 you're a teenager now and that's not kid stuff. As we'll see, allegedly trick or treating is a transition from kidhood to adulthood. And by the time you're 13, you've made that transition. That's in your past.

It's sad, but it's, I don't know why I'm talking like Christopher Walken all of a sudden, but I am. Yeah, maybe I wasn't going that late, but I definitely remember going by myself at a certain point. But now with my neighborhood is just, I see mostly parents not involved at all. Where they're kind of like, if your child is two or three, helping them walk to the door and stuff. Sure.

But otherwise, we're just drinking and the kids are doing their thing. So let's talk about this then. Let's skip toward the end and we'll jump back, okay? There is this debate over whether it's better to just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best and let your kids go out and trick or treat on their own. Whether that's good or whether we need to, the world's just too unsafe for that and we need to much more manage kids' trick or treating than just letting them go out on their own. Depends on where you are.

That's the big divide. And one of my personal heroes, the world's worst mom, Lenore Scanzzi, who came up with the free range kids blog and the whole movement, frankly, she makes this really great point that when we let kids trick or treat, we let them confront danger like on their own. And it's real, it's just a thin, the narrowest margin of danger. I mean, people always talk about like the worst things that could happen on Halloween when a kid's out trick or treating, getting hit by a car, getting kidnapped by a stranger, getting like...

An apple with a razor blade in it. Yes. It happens and it can happen, it's true, but it happens so infrequently that the chances are it's not going to happen and you're actually better off just letting the kid roll the dice. Because as Lenore Scanzzi puts it, when you go trick or treating, you're transitioning from being a kid to a grown-up and you're doing this quite literally, you go with your parents first and they kind of teach you the rules of the road, like just take one piece of candy or that house over there has their lights off.

So leave them alone, they don't want to have anything to do with this. And then after that, you let them go on their own, right? And they kind of take the ball and roll with it. And she says that when they're out trick or treating, kids dressed like grown-ups, they take to the streets. At night. They encounter the scariest possible locals, witches and goblins. And then yes, they're doing it at the scariest possible time, night.

And the whole thing is dress rehearsal for adulthood. And that like that's the benefit of trick or treating. I don't quite get that. That is the same as adulthood, like you and I all the time walking around at night fighting goblins and witches. Sure, right, exactly. Where would we have been without trick or treating to prepare us for fighting goblins? But just confronting fears on their own without their parents managing their world for them

so that they can handle themselves, have the confidence to know they can handle themselves. And I guess feel good about having confronted their fears and gotten candy in return. Let's not forget about that. Now on the other hand, it's just take the candy. It's fine. Right. Mommy and daddy made it perfect for you. All you have to do is go get the candy.

You're in a perfect bubble and everything's fine. So I kind of tend to fall on Lenore Scanaszi's side on that. Well, should we talk a little bit about the, you know, whether or not there have been all these real horror stories over the years and whether or not any of those are true. As far as the razor blade and the apple and stuff like that, hypodermic needles and candy, this stuff doesn't happen. No, and the thing to point out, and I know we've talked about it before, is that it was an urban legend that came true.

Right. There was one case, and this is actually kind of funny if you ask me, in 1959 there was a dentist in California named William Shine who took aloe laxative pills and disguised them as candy and give out 450 of them to kids, and they were all pooping, I guess. So I think a fume did poop. Nobody got injured though. Right. No, you're not going to get injured from a laxative.

You could poop over poop. Over poop? Yeah. So that is when I think this real story got out, and then all of a sudden it gets morphed into needles and razor blades or poison or candy laced with heroin and stuff like that. Well that did happen. Well, yeah, but that's the thing, like the examples that are listed are reverse engineered almost.

Right, right. So there was a little boy in Texas who died from eating a cyanide laced pixie stick in Texas, and I can't remember what year it was, and it turned out that it was his dad. That his dad was the scum of the earth who had taken out insurance policies on his own children and then gave them spiked Halloween candy to make it look like some mad poisoner had killed his kids so he could collect insurance, and one of his kids did die, but it wasn't just some random Halloween poisoner. That guy didn't really exist at the time.

Yeah, 1970 in Detroit was the heroin incident. This kid overdosed, these kids ate their uncle's stash is what really happened, and then that uncle was like, oh crap, let me sprinkle the heroin on the candy and cook up the story and maybe cook up some heroin since I'm cooking, and to try and get out of this. So again, it really happened, but not in the way that you think. No. The thing that got everybody, so that William Shine guy, who I just think is a skill for that because he scared the pants off of America's parents.

He basically said, hey, hey, you know how you're letting your kids run free? Something really bad could happen to him, and I just showed you how, and from the next year on, the parents were anxiously involved in Halloween like they never had been before because of William Shine, but the thing that really killed Halloween, or at least cemented I think the anxieties in the heads of parents in America, is that Tylenol Poisoner canceled Halloween 1982. Did it really? Almost drove Ben Cooper costumes out of business.

Candy sales went down 50%. Trick or treated in 1982. Well, your parents didn't love you. I think I did too. I would remember not trick or treating one year. Yeah, because that would have been 11, that's prime time. Apparently those are the retirement years. But all of this stuff added a veneer of fear and anxiety on trick or treating for parents,

not for kids necessarily, but for parents, and it drew them into what was possibly just a kid run activity because of fear, probably irrational fear. And now you have to this day, the FDA sending out guidelines around Halloween saying, don't let your kids eat any candy until they bring it home, which is just torture, and you have to inspect it. And if you see any pinholes or tears or anything that looks weird, just throw it away. Some hospitals say bring your kids candy and we'll x-ray it to see if there's any razor blades or needles in it or something like that.

This is the kind of terror that ironically is overlaid on Halloween. It's like fun terror has actual real terror on top of it, which makes it less fun. We don't inspect candy. Oh, you don't? You roll the dice, huh? Yeah. That's great. I don't know anyone who does.

Really? Oh man, I was raised like that. You inspected candy. Oh yeah, my parents were serious about it. We never did. I don't now. I just, I don't know. Maybe it's that thing of like, if you're the, because it doesn't happen.

Right. No, I'm heartened to hear that. Because when we did our free range kids episode, I remember thinking like, what's, what's going on now? Like, like kids are treated like this or not allowed to run free? Kids aren't being poisoned by Halloween candy. It's just not happening. Right.

You know? Yeah. Plus in our neighborhood with the sanctioned closure, all the candy is, people aren't buying their own candy. It's like the neighborhood buys all the candy and they congregate it in these couple of blocks. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

Okay. That's what's been living among us. It happens. But that's like being scared to walk out your front door for fear of being murdered. Right. Right, Chuck. You know? You just can't live that way.

You can't live that way. You know, Yumi told me a story about a village, like villages in Japan have like a festival or two every year. Like the whole community comes out, it's like a big deal. And there was one village, a little tiny town where this one woman just, I guess went mad and poisoned the curry that she brought to the village thing and that killed a bunch of townspeople. It happens.

It does happen, but you're right. You can't not eat the curry just because of the small, small chance that some mad person has poisoned it. Yeah. The way I look at it is if that's what happens, then that's, you know. Your numbers up. Your numbers up and your story in the newspaper to scare other people. Sure.

You're immortalized on stuff you should know. It's trick or treat going away, Josh. I don't know, Chuck. I say no. Okay, that's good. I'm glad to hear that. Because again, I'm living hashtag condolife. I'm out of the action.

Yeah. I mean, there's the last bit of this article you sent talked about it going away potentially, but I just, I don't think that's ever, ever going to happen. So what are your arguments for it going away that it might? My arguments? Or your, you know. These are my observations. Your observations.

One of the big ones is that fear among parents, that helicopter parenting has not been good for trick or treating. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But think about that's a real struggle going on right now over parenting versus under parenting. Which one's going to win out? Right.

Okay. Another one is there's a perception that trick or treating is dying out, which is kind of funny. Is there? Yes. Because people are moving back into towns and gentrifying those towns. Like we talked about in the historic district episode. And as they're doing that, trick or treating was never huge in the city.

And so people who were raised in the suburbs and you were used to it are moving into the city and there's no trick or treating going on anymore. So I guess trick or treating is dying because that's what I'm seeing. I differ. I beg to differ with that too. Okay. But I mean, you don't live in the city city. You live in a neighborhood.

Yeah. But that's all Atlanta is. This is a bunch of neighborhoods. Okay. You mean I don't live downtown? In Des Moines. I don't know. No one lives in downtown Atlanta.

No, it's true. Although it has gotten cooler than it was like a decade ago. Sure. But I beg to differ that trick or treating doesn't go on in the cities. I think there are apartment buildings in New York where people trick or treat. Just because it's not the picket fence suburban neighborhood, I think trick or treating goes on everywhere. But this author, Julie Beck, who wrote in The Atlantic, she put it really well that

basically the suburbs and trick or treating just go hand in hand. Sure. Like the suburbs are set up for trick or treat. You got houses that are close together. Super safe. Yep. Where people who live there are just well enough off to buy enough candy for the whole neighborhood.

Yeah. They all have kids. They know each other enough that you're not embarrassed for your kid to go up and trick or treat there. And you know that this candy is not going to be poisoned. In the city, you're much more isolated from one another even though you're living on top of one another. Yeah.

And I think maybe if we're talking about areas where there are poor kids and where poverty is run rampant, then maybe there's less traditional trick or treating, but there are programs and parties and things they try to do for those kids too. Okay. So those very things may end up being what kills trick or treating. I should say the purest version of trick or treating. You can also just make the case, well, that's what it's evolving into and just go with it. I think there will probably be both, but you're talking about the big Halloween parties, community

parties, trunk or treating. Trunk or treating in particular. Or what was it called? Halloween. Tailgating. Halloween tailgating. Trunk or treating. This is the idea that you, and we had this at our school.

We had the Halloween festival, but that did not replace trick or treating. Okay. This replaces trick or treating for a lot of children. Right. Yeah. So you go out and you get in a big church parking lot essentially. Yeah. And you have Bob and Frapples and the dunk tank.

This is different. And, huh? This is a little different than that. Well, I mean, I've seen these in person and... Okay, but that's a Halloween festival you're talking about. No, no, no. I'm talking about instead of trick or treating, it's a big party where they have candy and they have activities and games and stuff.

So are you going from car to car, getting candy? Like the cars or houses? Uh, no, not necessarily, but they're giving out candy. I mean, I can't... My friend, you're not talking about trunk or treating. It feels very nitpicky to me. No, but it's not. And here's why.

I'm not talking about a Halloween festival though. Okay. That's fine. That's fine. But you're not talking about trunk or treating either. You mean you walk five feet to a car and they give you candy and then five feet to another car? Maybe even less than five feet.

And they say, don't play any games. Don't bob for apples or don't do anything else. All you're doing is walking to cars. I'm not saying that they don't have bobbing for apples, but the purpose of trunk or treating is to basically set up a safe ring of cars where the kids are literally penned in. Yeah. The kids who used to be the ones who were running the show are now penned in by the anxious

adults cars, handing out candy rather than going to houses, walking around a church parking lot for trunk or treating instead of trick or treating. Yes. I get that. These are not the kids who could pull off... But that is not going to replace trick or treating. What the kids in the Goonies were able to pull off because they had freedom and spark that kids who trunk or treat are being denied.

Right. Let me go back to my friend, Lenore Scanazzi. She says that trunk or treating is just another adult-led activity, one that reinforces the community killing idea that kids aren't ever safe outside the home, school, or supervised program. And that is most definitely the message that kids get when they're trunk or treating. Yeah. I think that is not going to kill trick or treating or take over trick or treating.

We'll see, Chuck. I hope you're right. Because one thing I have not seen since I've lived in Atlanta is any big trunk or treating activities. Well, that's because you live in Atlanta. All you have to do is go out to the suburbs and they're everywhere. But the suburbs are made for trick or treating. They're out in the neighborhoods.

I got to end on a quote. I ran across a website, I guess a church website that's talking about trunk or treating. It's awesome, this quote. It says that the scariest part about the night, this is a trunk or treating night, isn't the costumes. It's the possibility that you could miss out on the chance to use trunk or treat to build relationships and reach these kids with the gospel. Well, yeah.

That is the opposite of what Halloween is all about. That's right. You got anything else? It's about arson. All right, 810 cases of it. Sorry, I'm one of those curmudgens, it turns out. One more thing? Yes.

Halloween, go on to our old stuff you should know website and search Halloween and Creepy and you're going to find some amazing slideshow as we put together over the years. Oh, that's right. I remember those. One of my favorite is cute and cruddy Halloween costumes, vintage Halloween costumes that were really creepy, Best Jack-o'-lanterns, all sorts of great stuff. Remember those days where we would count page views and get excited about that? Yeah.

This one felt like a bit of a tirade. Yeah. Was it? Okay, good. Well, if you want to know more about Halloween, get out there and trick or treat. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. This is follow-up on parapherias that we wanted to read for the last few weeks, just now getting to it.

Hey, guys. Long time listener, first time writer. I've had this episode pop up a few times. It's just been on my mind. I'm an RN with MSN and background and have background in neurophysiology who enjoys studying abnormal psych. I understand you were doing a show on a psychological term, but you may have ended up painting wrong ideas onto certain practices, specifically S&M and cross-dressing.

From what I've come to know, it's extremely rare that people practice these primarily for sexual gratification. Of course, these practices are adult in nature, but most regard it as an emotional practice or exploration of self. For example, shabari or rope bondage takes hundreds of hours of practice to perform, and those at partake describe a meditation-like state as a result, though most would say it's S&M. Most cross-dressers describe the long process of becoming female as cathartic and self-affirming,

although be it temporary. Simplifying cross-dressers to those who walk around in high heels to reach completion, well, imagine saying that about a trans woman. Of course, if you were doing these practices for sexual gratification, all the power to you. I suggest you look into kink culture as an episode. It's where a wide range of people congregate and share their interest in a community that is founded off respect and consent.

There are meetups and presentations on practices so that others can learn proper technique, though most that practice would like to keep their privacy. And that is from Anonymous. Thanks a lot, Anonymous. That was a good correction email. That's right. Yep. If you've been in touch with us like Anonymous did to set us straight, we love that kind

of thing. You can join us at stuffyshouldknow.com and check out our social links there. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.