We owned the night...

I've been reading a favorite blog; the post is about trick-or-treating, where the blogger posed the problem of knowing whether or not her apartment-house neighbors wanted/didn't want little gremlins knocking on their doors. There ensued the usual lengthy, and always interesting, discussion about how families work it out today.

The big question was, how do you know whether or not someone wants kids to knock on their door? In an apartment house, there may be a pumpkin-shaped Post-it on the door; in towns, it's often the porch light that signals "Gremlins Welcome Here!"

It used to be easy to tell. When I was in grade school, the week before Halloween, the teacher would ask, "Who needs a Maltese cross?" It was our responsibility to know who in our neighborhood should not be trick-or-treated. Miss Hager liked the kids to come around, but her renter, Miss Potts, was off limits; C. Madison Landaker was too easily confused; and the couple up on Walnut didn't speak English or understand Halloween. So, we asked for the orange stickers with the black cross:



The cool thing about this was that it was the kids who picked the houses to avoid, and who delivered the stickers, AND who defended those houses from any kid who tried anything funny. No parents went out with their kids. The neighborhood was ours, all ours, all evening.