Hallowe'en Apples!!

That was the call of children that rang across my hometown neighborhood, though you did have to get the cadence right...

"HAL-low-EEEN Ap-PUHLS!!"

Oh, we did "Trick or treat!" too and did indulge in our own brand tricking the candy-givers as we got older (mostly harmless).  But some people did hand out apples, and for some reason we called out for them...despite apples being the worst thing to get besides a rock.  Occasionally you'd get a caramel apple...those were good.  People also made popcorn balls back in those days; though the paranoid warnings were present even then.

But where did that call come from?

I grew up in Calgary and all the kids there yelled it every year.  I moved to Arizona and nobody ever said it here.  Must be a Canadian thing, I figured.  But I ran into other Canadians from time to time and they had never heard of it either.

Curiouser.

So I went onto an interwebz forum of Canadians and this is what I learned.  The only people who (quite nostalgically) recalled the phrase lived in Red Deer and Calgary and knew of the habit in some other central-southern Alberta towns.  I don't know if it still rings out today or if it was limited to a small place in time as well as geography.

Either way, Brendan and I are continuing the tradition on the streets of Tucson tonight.