"Trick of treat!" I remember cold Halloween nights when my siblings and I trick-or-treated back in my hometown in Michigan. With either my mother or my aunt following behind, we'd run door to door through our neighborhood and those beyond, excited by the possibility of being, for just a few hours, someone else–a ghost, a cowboy, a hobo, a pumpkin-headed something. The wind blew, the leaves scraped down the sidewalk, the bare branches of trees swept the moon as we made our way from house to house, like tiny bandits, making off with the loot! It was magic. It was the nighttime, past-your-bedtime, anything was possible magic, and that made it all the more thrilling. We were bolder behind the imagined anonymity of our costumes and masks and the unaccustomed rush of sugar, by the freedom granted us by the genious who invented this remarkable holiday. We owned these darkened streets, scented with smouldering leaves.

And amazingly, dozens…scores…hundreds of people opened their doors to us, dropped handfuls of candy into our bags or buckets. What a remarkable thing! What hospitality! This was like Christmas, but not just for friends and families–for everyone! All you had to do was ring a doorbell and shout "Trick or treat!" and the door opened, and boom! treats! (or, occasionally and with some disappointment, a box or raisins or an apple). This was grace, dropping underserved and unearned in a paper grocery sack or an old pillowcase.

Meanwhile, back at home, my father sat in the living room, waiting for the doorbell to ring, repeating this same ritual for the kids who stopped at our house. It took several years to realize my father was another dispenser of Halloween candy-grace, while I was out harvesting it from others.

Back then, it seemed as if the entire town opened their doors to strangers for this one evening. We gave away our Dum-Dums and Smarties and Tootsie Rolls with abandon, without concern for who recieved them. A goblin, a demon, a skeleton, a vampire–such riff-raff!–all were treated the same.

So come on in, whomever you are behind that mask.

Text and image © 2010 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.