Halloween is the number two holiday in terms of spending in the United States.  It's come a long way from the days of those awful hard orange and black peanut-buttery candies.  What were those called?

Anyway, the family carved our pumpkins this weekend.  That's my pumpkin on the left, Seth's in the middle, and Sam's on the right.

In our Good Question meeting today, we talked about a story for later this week about trick-or-treating.  Is it just us, or are there fewer people going door-to-door to trick-or treat?  It seems to me that Halloween is a bigger deal now, but a lot of the action has shifted from the neighborhood to the malls and organized parties. 

When I was a kid in suburban Chicago, we'd get home from school, grab a pillow case, and start knocking on doors.  We did the four blocks in my subdivision, then the "new houses" (which had big candy bars), and then we got in the car, went to my grandma's neighborhood, and did another four or five blocks.

No one does that today, do they?  I buy 30 full-size candy bars every year to give to kids that are friends (and to anyone who mentions seeing this on the blog!), plus lots of the fun-size candy.  And I always buy too much.  I'll try to find some research to answer this one-way or another, but what has your experience been?  Is trick-or-treating dying?

UPDATE: Lots of discussion at  A Day In the Life and MNSPeak on this.  General consensus: There's still lots of trick-or-treating.  This probably won't end up being a Good Question on Thursday.  Probably.