When is trick or treat?

[Slayer]

For me, it was always Halloween night. For little kids, they'd come out before the sun sets and the older kids after. So around 5-ish to 11.

Shopping centers here tend to do Trick-or-Treat, too. The one I work at is Halloween day, all day. It's mostly for the little ones since it's cold outside.

I love and hate working Halloween. It's awesome because the kids are so adorable, but since I work alone, I often have a client at the cash and a bunch of kids staring at me until I give them candy. Thankfully, working in a card shop, the customers are understanding and find them adorable, too, so I can stop to give them candy and continue serving XD

Except for the older kids that get a plastic bag from the grocery store and a mask from the dollarstore =c That always bugs me.

[Becks]

For me, it was the last Sunday of the month, in the afternoon.

Then I went to NJ. The 31st, no matter what day of the week. If it was during the week, the TOTers went out after school. On a weekend? Sometime after noon.

End time? Whenever they stopped getting candy.

[Kara]

Growing up, Trick or Treating always started at sunset and usually the "official" end time was 9pm.

In the city I live in now, a smaller city than I grew up in, they do "Trick or Treat Down the Street." Basically you walk from one end of Main street to the other, and all the business hand out candy to the kids. It starts at like 5 or 6. No one even goes door-to-door here, because you get so much candy downtown anyway. On one hand, I'm a little disappointed I've never had to take my kids roaming the city in search of sweet noms. Going door-to-door was awesome, you had no idea what you were going to get, you got to see some pretty kickass decorations at some houses, the occasional "haunted back yard," and even the disappointment of those occasional houses that gave you a pencil or a penny. On the other hand, the way they do it here works so well there's no point in trying to do anything different.

[Kogarashi]

I grew up in a small town in upstate NY, and there trick-or-treating was done on Halloween, no matter what day of the week it was. My parents wouldn't let my sisters and I trick-or-treat on Sundays due to religious reasons, but would still hand out candy to the rare few who stopped by our house (we lived out in the middle of nowhere, so the only people to visit our house were the two other families with small children in the immediate area), and would make it up to us by buying a big bag of mixed candy for us to share in place of all the candy we were missing out on that year. Trick-or-treating usually started between 5 and 6pm, though really super little kids would be out earlier, and ended around 9pm when the houses ran out of candy and the high school vandals came out to egg and TP things. Because my family lived out in the country, Mom or Dad would drive us to the other houses in the immediate area (which always gave out the best candy because they had so few kids to give to), then into town to the main residential street that everybody visited.

My senior year of high school, some friends and I decided to go as our own group to trick-or-treat rather than with our parents and younger siblings. We did fairly well for the most part, visiting a few extra neighborhoods and starting out later on purpose to make sure we weren't hogging all the little kids' candy. We were all in costumes (and not just cheapo masks and street clothes, either), and might have had someone's younger sibling with us. Our most memorable stops of the evening included accidentally visiting the school principal's house (we didn't know where he lived), and the one lady who yelled at us for "not leaving candy for the little kids" when it was 9pm, there were no little kids on the street because they'd all gone home, and you could actually see a few kids down the street in hoodies with egg cartons and toilet paper rolls. Lady should've been glad we were trick-or-treating instead of vandalizing.

Out in Utah when I was attending college, trick-or-treating was also done on Halloween proper, frequently after dark, though I rarely got to hand out candy due to living in student housing (no one visits student housing because they're "too poor" to hand out candy or something). Other Halloween activities like trunk-or-treating and parties frequently happened the weekend before.

In our current town (southern CT), trick-or-treating is still on Halloween, but you can frequently find other activities going on on various days the week leading up to it. The university bookstore has an activity the Saturday before, my church usually has a party the Friday before, our apartment complex has a party some day beforehand, and so on. Hubby usually takes our kids out while I stay home to hand out candy, but this year we're trading jobs at my oldest's request. I'm still not sure if I'm going to dress up to escort them (my costume is a medieval-style dress and might be too unwieldy, especially with the baby in the sling), but I'm going to tell Hubby he has to dress up to hand out candy (he's going to be the 10th Doctor).

[Dasota]

For as long as I can remember, it's *always* been on Halloween itself. Though I've heard of beggar's night happening in some parts of the city. Out in California, it went for as long as you could get candy from people/before you fell asleep on your feet. In New York, the tiny town I lived in, they did it from 4-8, early enough for the young ones to get candy, long enough for the older kids to get their fill. Sucks though that when I was young enough to go in NY, it was *always* super cold and I had to wear a jacket over my costume.

[flybye023]

We always trick-or-treated on Halloween unless it fell on a Sunday, then we did it Saturday night.

Where I live now it's always done on Halloween and seems like it generally starts in the evening. We've sometimes had them come around 5 p.m. or a little earlier but usually it's 6 or later and pretty much stops by 9.