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Politics

Halloween is for kids, isn’t it?

Tom Purcell on

It’s a question worth asking in these nutty times: how old is too old to trick-or-treat?

On the question-and-answer website Quora, some people ask if the age of 12 is a good time to hang up the ghost costumes.

That sounds about right to me. My mother would have decked me if I’d tried to collect candy in the 9th grade.

Trick-or-treating has long been a rite of passage of childhood — that is, it used to be.

Other people responded to Quora that they see no reason for older people — adults in their 20s and beyond — to canvas their neighborhoods in costumes collecting free candy.

But in the past three decades Halloween has clearly gone from being just a fun-filled childhood event to a serious adult event.

 

In 2009 I talked with Robert Thompson about Halloween. He’s a pop-culture expert who is the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

He explained that the post-World War II years were the golden age of Halloween for kids but beginning in the 1990s it had been claimed by adults.

Why?

He said then that Halloween had become the one day of the year that adults could really let themselves have fun by dressing up and doing something outrageous that they would never do the rest of the year.

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Copyright 2022 Tom Purcell, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com

 

 

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