Trick or Treat Votive Holder

Vintage Trick or Treat Bag

Though the sharing of treats on All Hallow's traces back to the holiday's roots as an ancient New Year's celebration, trick or treating is a phenomenon of the distinctly American holiday of Halloween. Halloween in tum-of-the-twentieth-century America might be barely recognizable to a contemporary citizen: it was much closer to its origins as a harvest celebration, complete with parades (mummings, to our foreparents), and a powerful belief in goblins (other people's children, to anyone's parents) who tore into the night hell-bent on destructiveness. Due to the holiday's association with mischief, wary homeowners of the early twentieth century devised a sure-fire method to lure costumed (therefore unidentifiable) urchins away from vandalism: giving out treats in exchange for immunity from tricks.

Though trick or treating is at least a century old, defining the treat as candy is relatively new. As recently as the World War Two era, the treat was likely to be a doughnut, a sip of cider, even an apple (imagine trying to get away with that today!). Before the advent of candy factories, candy-making was as expected a part of a homemaker's repertoire as canning. Around Halloween time, homemakers often spent days in the kitchen, rattling big glass thermometers and pouring vials of exotic oils, in order to fill small waxed-paper bags with the house specialty: chewy nougats, bright sour balls, snowy vanilla drops, tinted coconut patties, home-dunked chocolate cherries, snapping shards of praline, hand-pulled taffy, and, of course, fudge. Oh, sure, in the rich part of town, at fancy front doors were doled out the local confectioner's lollipops and jelly beans (and the occasional rum ball for a determinedly cheerful chaperone), but in the flurry of late century marketing these concoctions migrated to Easter baskets, and Halloween - at least in some of our minds - shall always belong to old-fashioned treats.

With the advent of consumerism - and, let's face it, fear - you just can't give homemade candy to strangers' kids anymore. And what kid today, confronted with a peanut butter kiss hand-wrapped in orange paper, wouldn't grumble about the bags of candy that fill store shelves this time of year? To honor yesterday's candy makers and all the Halloween memories they contributed to, here is a quick, fun project that uses the graphics from those waxy candy bags of Halloweens passed. When you're done, place a flameless votive candle in a votive glass, settle it inside the sheath you've created .. . and go make some popcorn balls.

Click here for this trick or treat votive holder project, and here for other paper crafts at Urban Home Blog.

Resources
Headless Horseman Softie
Red Hot Popcorn Balls
Divinity