Now, I have to be honest with you; trick-or-treating as we know it wasn’t practiced during the Regency era. But the elements that go into trick-or-treating have a rich and ancient history. The custom of trick-or-treating combines two very old Celtic traditions: guising (wearing costumes and masks as a disguise) and souling (also spelled soaling ), where the poor would knock on people’s doors to ask for ”soul cakes” (food) or money. In return, the supplicants would offer to pray for the souls of departed loved ones. If “soul cakes” were the original “treat,” the “trick” in trick-or-treat has its origins in the pranks that were often played on Halloween night. There’s evidence that Halloween mischief-making goes back at least a couple of centuries. There’s a line about “fearful pranks” in Hallowe’en by Scottish poet John Mayne, a 1780 poem about Halloween celebrations that may have influenced Robert Burn’s poem (described in this post ) on the same theme half a deca
. . . where the past is mirrored in the present