I think that it is cute when little kids come around in costumes and it is a community building ritual when we give them treats. Most of the kids this year visiting my house were Asians with a mix of East and South Asians. Our neighborhood is in constant ethnic transition. A couple years ago there were a lot more Hispanic kids. Not many of the kids ringing my doorbell look like mine. Those neighborhoods are a little farther out into the single family home suburbs. Our town-house complex has very few kids in general. Most of the kids we see around here come from the garden-apartment complex next door. It is evidently a first-stop for ambitious immigrants, who seem to move out to homes as soon as they can, hence the transition. That was the experience with the friends my kids knew from there when they were smaller.
When college kids celebrate Halloween it is usually a fun party. I remember the big parties on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. The one that made the biggest impression on my memory was a guy who dressed up like a man taking a shower. He carried with him the whole apparatus, the shower and model of a bathtub. It was hard for him to move through the crowds.
However, this holiday has become way too big in the last couple decades. It is, after all, a kids’ holiday, unless you really believe in it, in which case it is a vestige of dark-age superstition.
When people well-past college age take Halloween too seriously it is a little pathetic, but I heard on the radio that the slightly past prime crowd is where the growth comes in the sales for costumes. People who evidently have too much money and no kids through whom they can have the vicarious Halloween fun are the biggest holiday revelers. It is maybe not that there are so many participants but they spend bigger bucks on costumes, sometimes hundreds of dollars to dress up for one night like ghosts, goblins etc, according to news reports. A fool and his money are soon parted. With the economic downturn I suppose many of these guys will be dressing up like bums next year.