Trick or Treat Was First Printed in 1927: It Was About Stolen Gates
The earliest known appearance of the phrase in print comes from a small newspaper in Blackie, Alberta, in November 1927.
It is not a sweet story. The reporter describes children going to the front door and the back door demanding trick or treat, and notes that no real damage was done except to the temper of the people who spent the next morning hunting for their gates, their barrels, and their wagon wheels, which had all been hauled out into the street.
That is the origin of the phrase. Not children in costume. Property, in the road, at dawn.
The historian Nick Rogers, who wrote a book on the holiday, has said he had believed the earliest reference was from 1947 until the Alberta clipping surfaced. Twenty years earlier than anybody thought, in a hamlet in southern Alberta, somebody wrote down the words we now say to five-year-olds dressed as dinosaurs.
Understanding how it got there means going back about six hundred years.
Souling: prayers for cakes
The oldest ancestor of trick-or-treating is souling, and it ran on the two days after Halloween, not on Halloween itself.
Poor people, and often children, went door to door on Hallowmas, the first of November. They offered prayers for the dead of that household. In exchange they were given food, and the food was frequently a small spiced cake made for the purpose.
The belief was direct and unembarrassed. Every soul cake eaten released a soul from purgatory. It was a transaction, both sides believed in it, and both sides got something they wanted. The household got prayers said over their dead by somebody with time to say them. The souler got dinner.
It originated in Ireland and Britain, and comparable customs for the souls of the dead ran as far south as Italy. It was common enough by the late 1500s that Shakespeare expected a London audience to catch a joke about it. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, written around 1593, the servant Speed accuses his master of "puling like a beggar at Hallowmas."
Puling means whining. It is a joke about a man moping for love, and it only works if everybody in the theater has recently had a souler on their step.
Guising: sing for it
The Scottish and Irish version is called guising, from disguising, and it changes the terms of the deal.
A Scottish account from Halloween 1895 describes masqueraders going house to house in disguise, carrying lanterns made from scooped-out turnips, and being rewarded with cakes, fruit, and money.
Rewarded. Not given. In guising you do not get anything by standing there.
You sing. You tell a joke. You recite a poem or a ghost story or you play something on an instrument. Then, and only then, you are paid. The performance is not decoration on the custom. The performance is the custom.
Here is the thing almost nobody knows, and it is the best fact in the whole history of this holiday:
The trick was never a threat. It was a turn.
A trick, in the old sense, is a bit. A routine. Your party piece. The thing you do. The modern reading of trick or treat as an ultimatum, give me candy or I damage your property, is a North American invention, and it arrived with the mischief, not with the tradition.
In parts of Scotland children still guise. They still have to earn it.
How it crossed
Guising shows up in North America earlier than the phrase does. A Kingston, Ontario newspaper reported in 1911 that it was normal for the smaller children to go street guising on Halloween between six and seven in the evening, visiting shops and neighbors and being rewarded with nuts and candy for their rhymes and songs.
Rhymes and songs. In 1911, in Ontario, they were still performing.
In 1919 Ruth Edna Kelley published the first book-length American history of Halloween and made an observation that has aged perfectly: every Halloween custom in the United States is borrowed or adapted from somewhere else. Americans did not invent this holiday. They imported it, wholesale, from people getting off boats from Ireland and Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century.
What Americans did invent was the vandalism at scale, and then the fix for it.
Candy is a bribe
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween in North America had a real problem. Gates off hinges. Outhouses tipped. Windows soaped. Streetcars derailed, in some cities. The Alberta clipping is a small, cheerful example of something that was, in larger places, expensive.
Communities responded by organizing. Give the children somewhere to go, something to do, and something to eat, and they will not spend the evening relocating your fence.
Trick-or-treating in its modern form is that bargain, formalized. The phrase kept the threat in it because the threat was the point. Then the war came, sugar was rationed, and the practice went quiet. When rationing ended it came back enormous, and within a few years the candy industry had noticed.
Individually wrapped candy became the standard treat only after the 1950s. Before that it was cakes, nuts, dried fruit, coins, and whatever was in the house.
What to do with this on the 31st
Three suggestions, all of them free.
Ask for the trick. Do not hand a child candy for standing on your step in a mask. Ask them for a joke. Watch what happens to their face when they realize they are allowed to perform, and then watch what happens to the face of the child behind them, who is now frantically trying to remember a joke.
Say a name. Souling was prayers for the dead of that house, offered by a stranger. If you want the oldest version of this night, say a dead person's name out loud at some point in the evening. It does not have to be yours.
Answer every knock. Every version of this custom, souling, guising, mumming, all of it, depends entirely on the person who opens the door. The masked visitor cannot do their part until somebody decides to open. On the one night of the year when the dead are supposed to be walking, the whole tradition rests on the assumption that you will open your door to someone in a mask and give them something.
That is not a small thing to believe about your neighbors. It is worth living up to.