Saturday, October 29, 2011

Over-The-Top Trick or Treating


At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man.. Friday night was trick or treat night in Allentown.

Every trick or treat night here in the Westend of Allentown we get inundated with trick or treaters. I have no problem with the Halloween handouts. What I do have a problem is the huge numbers of them. There are a total of 4 kids who live in our half block on both sides of the street. So let's say there's as many as 15 more or so kids living to either side of our half block.

How then do you account for all these kids?

Video was taken from one of my surveillance cameras while we were away.

We go to our own kids houses each year for the last five to hand out our treats. One lives in Whitehall Township. The other in Coplay where both their neighborhoods have 10x's as many kids and yet 1/5th the number of trick or treaters. You may ask what accounts for this number of kids and why do we leave?

Well we used to burn through 15 bags of candy in the first hour alone even though we only handed one piece out to each. That's over the top. I've watched SUV's and/or vans pull up and unload 5 or 10 kids. They'd hit the houses, then pile back in the vans and go down to the next block. Then the next.

It's quite obvious downtown parents set about to go hit up the richie's in the Westend. I certainly can't blame parents for wanting to come out here where's it's safer. BUT on the other hand, we can't go through 12 lbs of candy in one hour either. It's taking advantage.

Blame it on the parents, I suppose, but I AM NOT WEALTHY. I AM ON Social Security and so are about 5 of my neighbors. If you will note in the video the guy handing candy out across the street on his front porch ran out about 45 minutes into this (around 6:45 PM).

So no hard feelings, but this is the choice we made for ourselves. It's a shame for the kids who actually do live in our neighborhood. But it does speak to the kind of attitude that seems to pervade in the culture of Allentown, does it not?


2 comments:

  1. I didn't watch the whole video, but I saw enough! WOWWWWEEE that is a lot of kids. Why are they all walking down the street the same way?

    Our neighborhood gets a lot of visitors during halloween, too. I am so thankful our township has a strict two hour limit to trick-or-treating - that helps manage the chaos. But it sure would be nice if everyone did trick or treat on the same night to limit the amount of people that could visit outside neighborhoods on Halloween.

    You're not grouchy, just reasonable. It's not the kids' fault, though - blame the parents and their culture of asking for handouts!

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  2. Why are they all walking down the street the same way?

    The flow was from East to deeper parts of Westend. A flow Westward from downtown further out.

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