Clif Knight

Hartselle Enquirer

The observance of Halloween in Hartselle and surrounding cities and towns is mostly about filling the bags and baskets of trick-or-treaters with candy treats and making sure they return home safely.

This is the objective of many local churches that offer trunk treats as a fun-filled alternative to the traditional Halloween celebration. Church members purchase treats and hand them out to kids from the trunks of their cars. In some cases, churches go a step further by offering soft drinks, cookies and popcorn.

A few years ago, before churches got involved, kids went trick-or-treating house-to-house. Even though many of them were accompanied by adults, others were exposed to heavy traffic on streets or the fear of being harassed by their older counterparts.

Pranks were commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s. Trick-or-treaters walked the sidewalks in the central business district and scribbled graffiti on the windows and walls of commercial buildings. In addition, eggs were thrown from passing vehicles. The result was an ugly mess, causing storekeepers the trouble of having to clean up before opening for business the next day.

Trick-or-treating was not a part of the Halloween observance when I was a kid. However, that didn’t prevent me and my buddies from playing a prank on passing motorists. We tied a length of fishing line to a woman purse and placed it in the middle of the highway. From a culvert under the highway, we would wait for a car to pass the purse, slow down and then stop to check it out. In the meantime, we’d retrieve the purse by pulling in the line. The look on the driver’s face when he or she realized that the purse was gone was a sight to behold.

A Halloween prank pulled on a neighbor farmer by my dad and his buddies far exceeded our own. In the dark of night, they removed the wheels of a one-horse buggy and placed the chassis and bed on the top of his barn. The neighbor found the wheels the next morning but overlooked the remainder of the buggy until it was spotted and reported by his neighbor later the same day.

Obviously, the tricks of Halloweens past were troublesome and potentially dangerous. The alternative is timesaving, safer and a lot sweeter.