We've raised four children (all adults now) with home-made costumes and festive decorations with jack-o-lanterns and spider webs clinging to door posts. Innocent fun with pretend costumes/makeup, spooky but harmless pranks, and of course lots of treats (not all necessarily sugar) has been enjoyed for decades in this household.
We have, in the past, had neighbors whose religious beliefs did not accept Halloween as 'harmless fun' - as also witnessed in a few comments to this thread. They would lock their house up tight and spend the evening in bible class with their four children. As a concession to these families, the local schools altered the long established Halloween festival to the "Harvest festival" ...allowing a separate area for costume parades and such. No harm, no foul.
It's how one chooses to interpret it. Our family opts to enjoy the time to dress up and pretend to be someone or something else for a few hours. Treats are like prizes for participation . . .polite participation...as you said, a good time to set a good example for proper manners by setting expectations for Please and Thank you ...as well as "Trick or Treat".
Happy Halloween to all!
BTW...my neighborhood is apparently aging out...we had only a handful of kiddies this year. In recent years we've had as many as 600 trick-or-treaters ring my doorbell. The weather is fairly good tonight - so I'm surprised at how few stopped by. I just hope the decline has nothing to do with the recent reports of PC limits on costumes - what with accusations of cultural appropriation and crazy clowns on the loose. Aye yay yay, I could go on...but you get the picture.
We never get any kids anymore, where we live, nor where we lived ten years ago. I think a lot of parents are just afraid to let the kids go out.
That’s very sad. Fortunately, there are gatherings at local community facilities; but it can’t be the same as what we experienced, going out in the dark and around the neighborhood ;-(