My Jewish, Canadian Halloween

No marauding egg-throwers or aerosol-can-wielding bad guys at all. I can’t summon up a single scary Halloween memory. The trickster aspect was completely missing from those chilly strolls. Neighbors, predictably, gave out apples, and the occasional Neilson’s single-bite mini chocolate bar. And, once, delicious home-made popcorn balls. (I know, I know; this would be inconceivable today, in our justifiably suspicious time when every single sweet or treat must be presented in its sealed wrapper.) All very benign.

The phrase “trick or treat,” with its underlying threat of harm, was unknown to us; it seeped into my consciousness when TV came into my life around age 10, and it sounded alluringly American. It wasn’t uttered on the streets of Winnipeg.