Yesterday I went to the store and bought Halloween candy hoping this will be the year I will finally get to give out candy. It made me remember some of my past Halloween experiences, and I have to say that while I enjoyed trick-or-treating when I was a kid, I really remember one Halloween in particular. It was a year when I was stationed at an Air Force base in Japan. I was one of many volunteers helping out with an event to bring Japanese children on base to trick-or-treat. There must have been a at least a hundred Japanese kids bused on to base from the surrounding community. I was assigned with a group of about six to eight children and three or four adults. I think the Japanese adults coached the kids on how to say trick-or-treat because many already knew what to do and say as we knocked on the first door of an American family. It was so much fun watching the faces of the little kids as they went door to door asking for candy. Slowly but surely those candy bags filled up much to the delight of the children. Many may not have spoken a lot of English but “trick-or-treat” was surely one phrase they knew very well by the end of the night.
