when did trick or treating begin in america
Trick-or-treating In North America, trick-or-treating has been a Halloween tradition since the late 1920s. In Britain and Ireland the tradition of going house-to-house collecting food at Halloween goes back at least as far as the 16th century, as had the tradition of people wearing costumes at Halloween. In 19th century Britain and Ireland, there are many accounts of people going house-to-house in costume at Halloween, reciting verses in exchange for food, and sometimes warning of misfortune if they were not welcomed.[1] The Scottish Halloween custom of "guising" – children disguised in costume going from house to house for food or money – is first recorded in North America in 1911 in Ontario, Canada.[2] While going house-to-house in costume has remained popular among Scots and Irish, the custom of saying "trick or treat" has only recently become common. The activity is prevalent in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Puerto Rico, and northwestern and central Mexico. In the latter, this practice is called calaverita (Spanish for "sugar skull"), and instead of "trick or treat", the children ask ¿me da mi calaverita? ("can you give me my sugar skull?") where a calaverita is a small skull made of sugar or chocolate.
Vaudeville In the early 1880s, impresario Tony Pastor, a circus ringmaster turned theatre manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in several of his New York City theatres.[8] The usual date given for the "birth" of vaudeville is October 24, 1881 at New York's Fourteenth Street Theater, when Pastor famously staged the first bill of self-proclaimed "clean" vaudeville in New York City.[2] Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.