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The variant ways trick or treating is handled nowadays really speaks to my experiences as a kid and as an adult. I think I've mentioned either to you or Alexander Hellene about the fact that I've lived in the San Diego area most of my life. I got to experience trick or treating in my neighborhood as a kid, or my Grandparents' neighborhood, and sometimes my Aunt's and Uncle's neighborhood. (Funny enough, it's just up the road from where I work now.)

Nowadays, it's all trunk or treat like you say, particularly where I am since it's a mobile park that isn't the best lit at night. However, the absolute best Halloween experiences I got were when I lived up in the San Jacinto Mountains in the late 90's. The town we lived in up there did a whole carnival in the town center that most people in the town would get involved in. The lead up to it was fantastic, you would do a Halloween walk from the top of the main business road in town all the way down to town center and the carnival. Along the way the business owners would set up stops to trick or treat at, and it had this beautiful small town feel to the whole thing. This was in the mid to late 90s and even into the early 2000s, after all the razors in candy or homemade stuff could be poisoned scares.

Despite that, you would still run into plenty of people who owned these businesses that weren't just giving out your typical fun size candy bars. You'd have older folks that would bake cookies or little handheld carrot cake muffins. You'd have family-owned businesses where they would make these massive cauldrons of piping hot spiced apple cider, because it was the mountains, it got chilly up there. You would have bounce castles, games, prizes to win at the carnival. They even had a fucking cake walk. I had never even heard of a cakewalk when I lived down here as a kid, and have never heard of one since coming back. That's the kind of wonderful old-fashioned community thing that you don't see anymore, and so much involved with that sort of thing was homemade. It's wonderful, and I really hope it still happens there because next year I would like to take my younger sister and her kids up there so we can do that again and give some of those memories to her children.

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I spent one Halloween in San Diego, living in University Heights, it was a very adult themed experience.

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No major shock there. It's still close enough to SDSU and UCSD for the college kids to pack in; it's right next to Hillcrest which is all restaurants, nightclubs, and flaunting gayness; and it's minutes from both the beach and multiple shopping centers. Add to the fact that a decent chunk of the nightclubs that run along University and E.C. Blvd are within walking distance and the formula basically writes itself.

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