I turned the lights on for the first time in like 4 years.

Only 2 kids showed up.

Halloween Sunset Junction (Silver Lake) style.
As usually my husband stayed home to give out goodies and I accompanied our daughter (age 8) and 4 of her friends out trick or treating. Along the way we hooked up with other groups and ended up with over 20 kids and 6 adults. We tricked or treated the residents with in a block of Sunset and all the business on Sunset Blvd (excluding the bars and sex shopps). All the long standing shopps and restaurants were expecting us and had great goodies ( thanks comic book store for giving the kids something to read instead of candy and thank you Serfios for giving them posters and stickers!), many of the newer and or up scale establishments had nothing for our little scavengers. It always amuses me how surprised the trendiest of the restaurants are, year after year, by the appearances of children in customs each 31st of October. You would think they would buy a bag or two of 99 cent only store candy and have the parking attendant hand it out the kids to avoid having 20 or so kids march into their white linen table cloth dinning rooms, disturbing their up scale patrons.

We spent about 2 hours on our expedition.

At home: the husband gave away 4 bags worth of candy. He was almost out of candy when I returned with my group of 5. Once we were completely out of candy, we started giving away the candy my daughter and her friends did not want.

All in all , a very typical Sunset Junction Halloween evening.

Here in South Pasadena, not a single knock on the door or shout of “trick or treat.” Weird.

Definitely less than years past.. a few around 7pm, then nothing after that..

I like it that you give out pretzels instead of sugar… good call.

Plenty of trick or treaters down in Long Beach.

More than I got last year, here in Glendale. Maybe 30 kids.

After an all-time high of 78 trick/treaters last year, here in our neck of Silver Lakewe, we were down this year to 58.

I talk to a lot with other parents (from my kid’s school, the YMCA, the City pool, in the extended neighborhood and in two Yahoo “public school parents groups”). Over the last few weeks many of these parents were talking about the Halloween thing- to trick or treat or not; go to the rec. center events, church run carnivals (were their impressionable younges will get a hefty dose of the evils of Halloween and the devil) or from the new family from a very small Asia country (I will respect their privacy and not name the country) “what is this ‘trick or treat?” The top issues preventing parents from doing the trick or treating thing was fear (and in Silver Lake and Echo Park, all the f’en hills!!). Fear of strangers (kind of sad so many of these parents don’t know their neighbors)(a note here- almost of all the kids who came to our house were kids from our block- or my daughters), of child haters, of pedophiles. Of everything. And this year, so many of these parents seam to be more fearful then in years past.

I got a rock.

lmao tua.

Just got back from Chicago and i wanted to say that we didn’t get a single tricker treater up to our house in echo park, on Halloween. We walked across the street and gave all of the candy we bought to the neighbors.