Was trick-or-treating born on Thanksgiving?

In November 1930, New York City's schools superintendent, William J. O'Shea, sent a circular to the city's schools. "Modernity," it said, as quoted by the New York Public Library, "is incompatible with the custom of children to masquerade and annoy adults on Thanksgiving day." The New York Times headline that week read "O'Shea Acts to End Parades Of Thanksgiving Ragamuffins."

The day after Thanksgiving, the Times reported the result: "Parading Thanksgiving Ragamuffins Scarce, Except Out Where City's Subway Lines End."

So what was he trying to kill?

Go back to 1909. On Sunday, November 21, the Rev. Dr. James M. Farrar of the First Reformed Church in Brooklyn gave a children's sermon on "Thanksgiving Ragamuffins," and the New-York Daily Tribune printed it the next morning. "Ragamuffin Day will soon be forty years old," he told the children. "About the year 1870, on Thanksgiving Day, the different societies in New York dressed in elegant costumes, paraded the streets and made social calls. The children, quick to see a chance for fun, began to imitate the grown-ups. Dressing in old clothes, many sizes too large, painting their faces or putting on masks..."

Farrar liked the custom. "The Thanksgiving custom of our juniors is, I believe, here to stay," he said. "In fact I would be sorry to see it given up. If it is here to stay, how can we make it pay?" His answer was to ask the children to put their pennies in the church's Thanksgiving offering for the poor.

Two years later, the Bain News Service photographed the maskers on New York's streets. The Library of Congress files the glass negatives as Thanksgiving holiday scenes from 1911: children in bowler hats, drawn-on mustaches, wigs and white masks, scrambling for pennies. The question they asked at the door, according to the NYPL's history of the custom, was "Anything for Thanksgiving?"

By 1930 the city's patience had run out, and charities offered a tidier version. Starting in 1937, the Madison Square Boys Club ran a supervised Thanksgiving costume parade. The Times described it in 1938 as "Taking the Place of Ancient Custom," and in 1940 ran the headline "400 BOYS PARADE AS RAGAMUFFINS." That parade's slogan, as quoted by the NYPL, was "American boys do not beg."

The custom faded slowly. The Times still listed "Ragamuffins Parade" in its Thanksgiving coverage on November 23, 1956, the last mention the NYPL found.

So was this the birth of trick-or-treating?

Scholars disagree, and both sides make a fair case.

• In 1994 the folklorist Tad Tuleja called New York's Thanksgiving masking "the most plausible 'missing link' between European solicitation customs and trick or treat."
• In 2020, Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center wrote that Tuleja "makes a convincing argument." His reason is that Thanksgiving masking "we know was widespread in America just before trick-or-treating emerged."
• The historian Samira Kawash, writing in the American Journal of Play in 2011, isn't convinced: "if Thanksgiving mummery is the missing link, it is a strange one." She found that trick-or-treating arrived in the East "sometime in the late 1940s," and that the earliest descriptions come from farther west, in Indiana, Washington and Oregon.

Here's what the record does show. Costumed children begged door to door in New York on Thanksgiving by the late 1800s, a pastor dated it to about 1870, and the city spent the 1930s trying to end it. Meanwhile, the NYPL notes, Halloween begging "did not become common until the 1940s and '50s." The two customs overlapped in time. Whether one became the other is still an open question.

Why creators care: a lost holiday with a villain (a schools memo), a sweet reversal (a pastor who wanted it kept) and free photographs. It's a short documentary, a picture book or a "lost holiday" video series, ready to go.

• Thanksgiving Maskers, Bain News Service, ca. 1910-15 (LoC, LC-DIG-ggbain-10008)

  View the record at loc.gov

• Thanksgiving Maskers, Bain News Service, ca. 1910-15 (LoC, LC-DIG-ggbain-10003)

  View the record at loc.gov

• Painting a Thanksgiving Masker, Bain News Service, 1911 (LoC, LC-DIG-ggbain-10006)

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• Thanksgiving, Bain News Service, ca. 1910-15: maskers in clown paint outside a restaurant window advertising "Roast Turkey... 40c" (LoC, LC-DIG-ggbain-14928)

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• Lydia Maria Child, Flowers for Children, Part II (1845), the book with "Over the river, and through the wood" (LoC). Our story on it: Over the River was never a Christmas song.

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• Newspaper clippings announcing Houdini's death, October 31, 1926 (LoC)

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The Library of Congress lists the Bain photographs as "No known restrictions on publication" (Bain rights statement). Credit line: "Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-#####."