I watched a Fantastic Documentary on the History Channel the other night which was all about the history of Halloween in Amercia. I am sure it will re-air at somepoint and I recommend all of you watch it.

Basically it talks about how Halloween in the late 1800's and early 1900's wasn't much different than how it is celebrated (or lack there of) in other parts of the world. It wasn't all that observed by many, those who did had learned to hate the night. It mainly a night where kids would get around into gangs and cause mischief-- no trick or treating, no costumes (outside of stuff to mask their appearance), and no scary ghost stories. Kids would run around and pull pranks on people -- but like how Americans must always make something BIGGER -- those pranks slowly became more and more malicious as time went on.

10s of Thousands of dollar in damage were recorded in the Country's major cities the day after Halloween as kids went around damaging and destroying public and private property. One particular Halloween, which saw numerous Building fires in Chicago and New York, was dubbed "Black Halloween"

The country as a hole needed to figure out a way to curb these actions of the nations youth and slowly community after community had began to hold "Halloween Parties" encouraging the local youth to come in off the street and have a happy and safe gathering. Soon after that, in a popular publication, a columnist wrote that she had seen children on her property looking to cause mayhem so she quickly grabbed some candy to give them, a bribe, to leave her alone. She wrote something to the effect of "By giving them Treats, there was no trickery" This slowly evolved into what we view today as "Trick or Treating"

The over all premise of the program was that we may view our Halloween Traditions as ageless but in reality the modern day Halloween has only existed for about 60 or 70 years.