Halloween is Saturday, October 31, and sometime that evening a small ghost or a very serious dinosaur will ring a doorbell and expect candy. It feels like the oldest tradition in the world. It is not, and the way it has changed is a better story than most people expect. We are florists, not historians, but we enjoy a good story. Where we add our own thoughts, we say so.
🧁 Before Candy: Soul Cakes
The roots of going door to door at the end of October go back at least to the 15th century, to a Christian custom of sharing soul-cakes at Allhallowtide, October 31 through November 2. People visited houses and took soul-cakes, either as representatives of the dead or in return for praying for the souls of the household. It was called souling, and it was recorded in parts of Britain, Flanders, southern Germany, and Austria. Shakespeare mentions it in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and in England souling remained an important part of these days until the 19th century. The practice of giving soul cakes continues in some places today, such as Portugal, where it is called Pão-por-Deus.
There are also older ideas that trick-or-treating may come from the Celtic festival of Samhain, marking the start of winter, when the souls of the dead were believed to cross into our world and were appeased with offerings of food and drink. One suggestion is that people impersonated those spirits and received offerings on their behalf, and that dressing up was also believed to protect you from them. The trick part has a very old cousin, too: a custom on the Greek island of Rhodes had children going door to door dressed as swallows, singing, and demanding food while threatening mischief, though it is extremely unlikely to be directly related to the modern custom.
🎭 Guising: The Performance Comes First
The closest ancestor of the modern custom is guising. In Scotland and Ireland, children went from door to door in disguise, and a gift of food, coins, or “apples or nuts for the Halloween party” was given out. Guising has been recorded in Scotland since the 16th century, and an 1895 record describes costumed guisers carrying lanterns made from scooped-out turnips and receiving cakes, fruit, and money. The detail we like best is that in Scotland and Ireland, children were traditionally supposed to earn their treats by performing a song, a joke, or a poem they had memorized. The same custom survives in parts of the United States: in the St. Louis and Des Moines areas, children are expected to tell a joke or riddle before they get any candy.
📜 “Tricks or Treats” Arrives
The words are newer than you would guess. The earliest known guising in North America was recorded in British Columbia in 1898, and that “trick or treat” was first recorded in Ontario in 1917, in a report in The Sault Daily Star that described gangs of children calling “Tricks or treats” and householders handing out coins so that their property would be left alone. Variants such as “treat or trick” turned up through the 1920s, and trick-or-treating does not seem to have become widespread until the 1930s, with the term first appearing in a national U.S. publication in 1939.
The phrase was not welcomed everywhere at first. Newspapers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s typically describe adults seeing it as a form of extortion, and for Halloween 1948 some boys in a New York City club marched with a banner reading “American Boys Don’t Beg.” Behavior like it had earlier been more common at Thanksgiving: in New York, children dressed up and asked for treats on Ragamuffin Day, until growing hostility in the 1930s led to the practice fading by the 1950s.
🍬 The Sugar Years
Here is a part of the story that surprised us. Trick-or-treating spread across the United States but was stalled by World War II sugar rationing, which began in April 1942 and lasted until June 1947. After that it took off quickly. There were the 1946 and 1948 radio shows, a 1951 Peanuts comic strip, and a 1952 Disney cartoon and television episode, and by 1952 the custom was firmly established in popular culture. In 1950 UNICEF started a program in which trick-or-treaters collected money instead of candy, and it held its first national campaign in 1953.
The phrase went the other direction much later. “Trick or treat” at the door was not common in the United Kingdom and Ireland until the 1980s, helped by the film E.T., and in Ireland it only became common in the 2000s. Before that, Irish children often said “Help the Halloween party.” It is a neat reversal: the custom crossed the Atlantic one way, and then the American version of it crossed back.
🚨 The Poisoned-Candy Scare
If you grew up being told to check your candy, you were part of a long story. Poisoned-candy myths are mostly urban legends about strangers hiding poison or razor blades in candy and giving it to random children. There have been confirmed cases of tampering, but they are rare, and no case of a stranger killing a child this way has been proven. The sociologist Joel Best collected newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 and found fewer than 90 that might have qualified as actual candy tampering, none of which he attributes to random attempts to harm children. Most were attempts by adults to gain financial compensation or, far more commonly, by children seeking attention. He also found five child deaths that authorities first suspected were caused by homicidal strangers, and none of them held up on investigation.
The myth may also distract from the more common danger on Halloween, which is cars: in the United States, children ages 4 to 8 are ten times as likely to be killed by a car on Halloween as on any other day of the year, and children of all ages are three times as likely. That is the part we would take seriously on Saturday. Use reflective tape or a flashlight, and cross at corners.
🚗 Trunk-or-Treat
The biggest change in recent decades is that many families no longer walk door to door. Trunk-or-treating is candy handed out of decorated vehicle trunks in a parking lot, often at a church or school, and it began in the mid-1990s as a “fall festival” alternative to trick-or-treating. Some parents see it as safer, and some as simply easier than walking a neighborhood. There is also a critique that the practice reflects car-dependent street design. Whatever you think of it, it is now part of how many people celebrate. Our Oregon sister shop wrote a guide to decorating a trunk with flowers.
🌼 What Flowers Have to Do With It
Quite a lot, if you squint, and this part is our own thinking. Souling was about giving something small to a neighbor in exchange for remembering someone who had died, and guising was about performing for a treat. Both are older versions of what a bouquet does: it is a small gift that says “I thought of you.” A few ways to use that this weekend:
- Thank the house that hands out the good candy. A small bouquet or a pot of mums for a neighbor who decorates every year is a lovely way to say it. Our guide to mums explains why they last.
- Make a candy bouquet. A paper cone or tissue wrap with a few treats and a real flower or two tucked in is a nice gift for a child who is too old for a costume.
- Remember someone. The soul-cake tradition was about the dead as much as the living, and November 1 and 2 are Día de los Muertos. Our guide to Día de los Muertos and marigolds covers how to do it respectfully, and our piece on why cultures send flowers to the dead goes further back.
- Keep flowers up for the party. Our gothic corsages and boutonnieres guide is a good source for dark, dramatic flowers, and our early fall bouquets post covers the warmer palette.
If you are bringing flowers to a party, our guide to keeping cut flowers fresh will help them last. We deliver seven days a week, including Sundays, to San Carlos, Redwood City, Belmont, San Mateo, and the rest of the mid-Peninsula.
📋 The Short Version
- Going door to door at the end of October goes back centuries: soul-cakes from the 15th century, and guising, with a song or a joke for a treat, since the 16th.
- “Tricks or treats” was first recorded in Ontario in 1917, became widespread in the 1930s, and spread across the U.S. after World War II sugar rationing ended in 1947.
- Poisoned-candy stories have been thoroughly debunked by researchers; the bigger risk on Halloween is cars.
- Trunk-or-treat began in the mid-1990s and is now a common alternative.
Sources, all read on October 30, 2026: Wikipedia, “Trick-or-treating,” “Poisoned candy myths,” and “Trunk-or-treating,” each of which cites its own references. The flower suggestions and safety reminders are our own.