Children across the country will be scurrying door-to-door on Thursday, dressed in costumes and hunting vigorously for that house giving out full-size candy bars. And for the first time since 1938, that will include kids in Des Moines.
The Iowa state capital, some 86 years ago, did away with Oct. 31 trick-or-treating in an effort to curb vandalism. Instead, the city came up with Beggar’s Night, which is held on Oct. 30 and is essentially the same as Halloween, except kids traditionally have to tell jokes before they receive their candy.
This year, however, forecasters are calling for storms and possibly tornadoes—which isn’t exactly ideal weather to send the kids out into. As a result, Beggar’s Night has been pushed to Oct. 31.
While it might sound odd to some, Beggar’s Night came about after the Des Moines police answered 550 reports of vandalism involving preteens and teenagers on Halloween in 1938. Those ranged from soaping windows to fires and destruction of property, according to the State Historical Society of Iowa.
By the mid-1940s, the number of Halloween incident reports was cut in half.
Kids who go out on Beggar’s Night need to be accompanied by an adult, and have a limited time to load up on sugar. Trick-or-treating is only allowed from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., typically. (Iowa’s not alone in putting curbs on trick-or-treating: Some states have age limits on who can go out.)
It has been a tradition for so long that many residents didn’t even realize it wasn’t a national occurrence.
“I didn’t realize we were that much of an anomaly because for us, this is normal,” Debbie Westphal Swander, owner of a costume shop in West Des Moines, told the Chicago Tribune.
