From its first mention in a UK broadsheet newspaper in 1956, the American custom of Trick or Treat at Halloween has grown phenomenally within Britain over the last few decades and is now firmly embedded within UK culture. By 2010, the spooky festival held on October 31 had blossomed into a UK industry worth £235million.
First Mention of Trick or Treat in UK Newspapers
Trick or Treat was first mentioned in The Times newspaper [subscription required] on January 12, 1956 in a feature entitled “Young Visitors in the U.S.A” written by an ex-pat. The article described how American children were “... armed with giant orange paper bags from the dime store ...” into which treats were dropped. Tricks mentioned included “garbage tipped on to his doorstep.”
The next mention in The Times comes in 1965 when an episode of Bewitched entitled “Trick or Treat” was listed as being scheduled for 8pm on BBC1 on December 15. The Halloween pastime was still so unknown in the UK in November 1970, that Michael Knipe felt the need to explain the term when he reported in The Times on how a five year old Detroit boy died after eating heroin-spiked sweets collected at Halloween.
Trick or Treat Question Asked in House of Lords in 1986
It was in October 1982 that Marina Warner, in another Times article entitled “The children who love to spell” reported that “… the American custom … is catching on fast in London…” By 1986 the custom had become so widespread that in the House of Lords that October Viscount St Davids asked “… about the legal status of the recently imported Hallowe’en trick-or-treat custom of demanding money on threat of playing a nasty trick…”
But it wasn’t until three years later that Halloween products first started appearing in mainstream high street stores of the time such as Woolworths, WH Smith and Paperchase – the latter shop confirmed to The Times newspaper that Trick or Treat was an American import the popularity of which had been aided by “… cult horror movies like Nightmare on Elm Street which have generally made the public more aware.”
Halloween Falling on a Weekend Boosted Retail Trade
Halloween celebrations gained another boost in the early 1990s when, according to one report in the Independent newspaper [accessed via Lexis Library, subscription required] of 1994, a spokesman from a Halloween goods import company explained how the increasing interest in the festivities was due to the fact that “… three years ago when Hallowe’en fell at the weekend, and it hasn’t fallen off.”
Ten years later, figures reported in The Express newspaper [subscription required] of October 30, 2004 showed that Halloween had created a £100million industry in the UK and that Tesco had, for the first time, allocated one third of its Halloween range to the adult section of its supermarket shelves. By October 2010, the BBC reported that Brits spent an estimated £235 million on Trick or Treat and other Halloween associated games and products.
Elaine Findlay - An expert cook, Findlay's passion for food is evidenced by the size of her kitchen and her library of old recipe books
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