In St. Louis, kids have to work for their Halloween candy.
At least, that’s how Laura Thake sees the city’s tradition of trading a joke for a treat.
“You have to do something to earn the candy,” she said. “To me, that seems like a perfectly normal thing.”
Thake is so steeped in All Hallows' Eve that she runs a website that catalogs Halloween home displays. But what's normal for her tends to bemuse new St. Louis residents.
While the jokes might be St. Louis’ most unusual Halloween tradition, it’s far from the only one. There are neighborhoods that go mad for decoration and trick-or-treaters who come from all over to see them.
But the expectations go both ways. There are expectations for those handing out candy as well. If you plan to sit inside and wait for your doorbell to ring, think again. Instead, bundle up, grab your candy and commit to sitting on your steps until the last costumed child is off the streets.
The Halloween jokes
Most St. Louis Halloween jokes are pun-based and Dad-joke adjacent.
What’s a witch’s favorite class? Spelling
What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? Arrrrr
What fruit do ghosts eat? Boo berries
Then there’s the jokes made up by the teller that make no sense. (Disclosure, those are this reporter’s favorite and get double candy.)
The practice is almost singular. Only in one other city — Des Moines, Iowa — are jokes part of the trick-or-treat tradition, said Amanda Clark, a historian at the Missouri Historical Society.
The jokes and the city’s Halloween traditions trace their roots to Irish and Scottish immigrants, she said. In the 1860s, newspapers began to mention Halloween parties full of “who’s-whos and socialities” in their social pages.
Over time, the Halloweengoers get younger. In the 1870s and ’80s, teenagers, mostly women, participated (many practicing the spiritualism popular at the time, Clark said, to divine their future husbands). The age range got even younger in the 1860s.
“That's where you start to see more reports of shenanigans,” she said. That means practical jokes and small-scale destruction, mostly among the upper class. By the 1930s, that revs up into actual destruction, including one report of a homeowner shooting a kid in the leg.
In the years just before World War II, St. Louis Halloween featured kids in costumes and candy. After the war, jokes became a thing. Clark said the change tracks with the shift away from mischief and toward trick-or-treating where the “costume is the trick, and the joke is the treat.”
She speculated that people have stayed so interested in the jokes because of how singular the practice is.
“The world is increasingly not unique,” Clark said. “But this is something that's ours, right? This is something we can kind of cling to that makes us unique and special.”
Halloween turns on the lights
Thake’s love for St. Louis’ home light displays started when she was a kid. Her parents would bundle her into their car, and they’d pick a direction and begin driving in search of holiday lights.
As an adult, she wanted to share that tradition and launched her online catalog, Holiday Light Hopping in 2016 with Christmas, adding Halloween the following year. Thake said she spends about 40 hours a week in the lead-up to Halloween reviewing displays submitted by homeowners and then visiting them at night to see if they are worthy.
“I love driving down the street and [feeling] the anticipation of getting to the house, if I had never seen it before, and then getting out and seeing what they've done,” Thake said. “It’s also just fun to share a passion. St. Louis definitely has a passion for Halloween.”
Thake’s site, which is free except for some curated routes stringing houses together, lists more than 100 displays that crisscross the metro area and beyond. And she’s constantly adding more.
She has too many favorites to name but points to Paul Roselle’s display in St. Charles as a perpetual favorite. Roselle decorates a row of five homes on his street and has expanded to a local barbecue restaurant, BobaQue.
A commercial pilot, Roselle was inspired by a neighbor from his childhood. About 10 years ago, he started with his own home and then gradually expanded down the street, accumulating more decorations every year and switching up his designs, which include haunted pumpkin patches, Nightmare before Christmas and more.
“I just like seeing people being happy,” he said.
Certain blocks in St. Louis, like Roselle’s, go all in on Halloween. They decorate extensively, many close to traffic and draw in trick-or-treaters from afar. Clark, the historian, speculates that this is due to the city’s setup.
“St. Louis is so neighborhood based, and that's such a big thing here,” she said. “So it's kind of fun. You know, people go around town to trick-or-treat in different areas that are not their neighborhood.”
That’s a sentiment Roselle agrees with, and he invites anyone to come see the displays and to trick-or-treat in his neighborhood, which he said is welcoming to all: “Whatever age you are, zero to 99, I will give you a piece of candy.”
