So let’s get to the bottom of this—and discover the best estimates for the timing of Trunk or Treat’s origins (the mid 1980s), the best explanation for where it originated (LDS churches), and the reason why it’s become a big deal (playing on affective and social ties while providing an easily monitored substitute for a deeply unsafe or unwelcoming pedestrian-hostile built infrastructure).
Criticism of trunk-or-treating usually revolves around familiar axes. Trunk-or-treating is a perversion of neighborliness, because it extracts the neighborhood ritual of trick-or-treating from a fixed geographical referent (that is, your neighborhood). It’s too car-centric, because it represents a surrender of a pedestrian activity to car culture. And it’s too inauthentic, because it’s planned and seemingly caters to parents who love to go all out for Halloween.
These are all raw themes, particular the car culture one. Underlying many of these is the conservative (not in the political sense!) drive for children to recapitulate “natural” childhood rituals—that is, the rituals of our childhood. As one anti-trunk-or-treat article argues
If you went door-to-door as a kid (and you probably did), you might remember the effort it took to procure a full pillowcase. How many houses did you have to hit up to achieve Halloween satisfaction? At trunk-or-treat, it’s a quick jaunt between rows of cars to come up with copious amounts of candy. No effort necessary on the kids’ behalf. As childhood seems to get more and more passive, this doesn’t sit well with me. Rather than playing outdoors with neighbors, more and more children sit inside staring at screens on a daily basis. Now you want them to skip the sidewalks entirely and just make a quick loop through a parking lot? Hard pass.
The giveaway here is that at least some of the disapproval has to do with dashed parental (or vicariously parental) expectations that one will get to recapitulate one’s own childhood with one’s children. (Notably, whether or not children enjoy trunk-or-treating is not really among the complaints here!)
Explanations for why the custom has evolved (and by now, yes, it is a custom—just look at the number of events large enough to get listed in a community calendar in Austin in 2022 alone) vary. The “rural distance” argument is the one people tend to turn to first—of course this makes sense, the argument goes, it’s so hard to drive from house to house! As we’ll see, I don’t buy it.