184 Trick-or-Treaters

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This year we had 184 trick-or-treaters. It’s a huge improvement over last year, but not one of the larger years.

2016: 184
trick-or-treaters.

Average Trick-or-Treaters by Time Block

Year-Over-Year Trick-or-Treaters

Halloween was on a Monday and, while it had rained earlier, was pretty clear otherwise.

This year they started doing a “Harvest on Main Street” event in my city which had an unknown impact on the trick-or-treat count. I know some friends who went to this instead of going door-to-door. It looked fun, so if they do it next year we may have to check it out. An indirect impact of this, of course, is that it means fewer people available to hand out candy, which could cause fewer kids to travel down certain streets.

We shut down at 8:00p to get Phoenix into bed (since that’s bedtime). I foresee this being the case for a few more years. The 8:00p - 8:30p range has always been where things taper off anyway, so it’s not a major impact.

Cumulative data:

  Time Block
Year 6:00p - 6:30p 6:30p - 7:00p 7:00p - 7:30p 7:30p - 8:00p 8:00p - 8:30p Total
2006 52 59 35 16 0 162
2007 5 45 39 25 21 139
2008 14 71 82 45 25 237
2009 17 51 72 82 21 243
2010 19 77 76 48 39 259
2011 31 80 53 25 0 189
2013 28 72 113 80 5 298
2014 19 54 51 42 10 176
2015 13 14 30 28 0 85
2016 1 59 67 57 0 184

Our costumes this year:

I didn’t actually pick a specific character this year, I just happened to like the pattern I found. I learned, however, that saying, “I’m a safari guy” or something to that effect wasn’t satisfactory to most people, who really wanted me to be a character. I had a few people think I was Dr. David Livingstone (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”) That’s fine, but it was interesting to see people struggle to attach a specific person to the outfit.

It makes me wonder how one might wear, say, just a historical reproduction costume or an original steampunk costume, and have that just work without it having to be someone specific. You can do that as a witch or a ghost, why not with other costume types?

I walked Phoenix around the neighborhood to do the trick-or-treating while Jenn handed out candy. This year Phoenix was far more into it (plus, no rain) so we went all over the neighborhood. At one point I actually had to pull out Google Maps because I couldn’t see the street signs and had gotten all turned around. We also nearly hit some houses twice since Phoenix really didn’t want to follow any orderly plan of attack.

Next year I think I’ll approach this in a more prepared fashion, with a map where I can mark down which street(s) we’ve hit and maximize the candy retrieval operation.

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