184 Trick-or-Treaters
This year we had 184 trick-or-treaters. It’s a huge improvement over last year, but not one of the larger years.
Halloween was on a Monday and, while it had rained earlier, was pretty clear otherwise.
This year they started doing a “Harvest on Main Street” event in my city which had an unknown impact on the trick-or-treat count. I know some friends who went to this instead of going door-to-door. It looked fun, so if they do it next year we may have to check it out. An indirect impact of this, of course, is that it means fewer people available to hand out candy, which could cause fewer kids to travel down certain streets.
We shut down at 8:00p to get Phoenix into bed (since that’s bedtime). I foresee this being the case for a few more years. The 8:00p - 8:30p range has always been where things taper off anyway, so it’s not a major impact.
Cumulative data:
| Time Block | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 6:00p - 6:30p | 6:30p - 7:00p | 7:00p - 7:30p | 7:30p - 8:00p | 8:00p - 8:30p | Total |
| 2006 | 52 | 59 | 35 | 16 | 0 | 162 |
| 2007 | 5 | 45 | 39 | 25 | 21 | 139 |
| 2008 | 14 | 71 | 82 | 45 | 25 | 237 |
| 2009 | 17 | 51 | 72 | 82 | 21 | 243 |
| 2010 | 19 | 77 | 76 | 48 | 39 | 259 |
| 2011 | 31 | 80 | 53 | 25 | 0 | 189 |
| 2013 | 28 | 72 | 113 | 80 | 5 | 298 |
| 2014 | 19 | 54 | 51 | 42 | 10 | 176 |
| 2015 | 13 | 14 | 30 | 28 | 0 | 85 |
| 2016 | 1 | 59 | 67 | 57 | 0 | 184 |
Our costumes this year:
- Me: safari guide/explorer (I blogged the making-of info)
- Jenn: the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland
- Phoenix: a witch
I didn’t actually pick a specific character this year, I just happened to like the pattern I found. I learned, however, that saying, “I’m a safari guy” or something to that effect wasn’t satisfactory to most people, who really wanted me to be a character. I had a few people think I was Dr. David Livingstone (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”) That’s fine, but it was interesting to see people struggle to attach a specific person to the outfit.
It makes me wonder how one might wear, say, just a historical reproduction costume or an original steampunk costume, and have that just work without it having to be someone specific. You can do that as a witch or a ghost, why not with other costume types?
I walked Phoenix around the neighborhood to do the trick-or-treating while Jenn handed out candy. This year Phoenix was far more into it (plus, no rain) so we went all over the neighborhood. At one point I actually had to pull out Google Maps because I couldn’t see the street signs and had gotten all turned around. We also nearly hit some houses twice since Phoenix really didn’t want to follow any orderly plan of attack.
Next year I think I’ll approach this in a more prepared fashion, with a map where I can mark down which street(s) we’ve hit and maximize the candy retrieval operation.