I don't know about trick or treating tradition, but I think Halloween is an old festivity related to the eve before All Saints' Day. Very big in Chicago area when I was a child, and I would guess we actually went door to door til I was ten or eleven. But, we were younger at ten or eleven then, socially, than any eleven year old I know now is.
I have grown increasingly uninterested in Halloween and I don't know if it is my naturally crabby self acting out or the fact that I spent my childhood getting black and orange napkins and orange cupcakes on my birthday (which is near now, but ne'er mind).
Out here in California, Halloween seems nearly to supplant Christmas and Thanksgiving as far as agglomeration of stuff for sale in the stores, aisles devoted to candy bars and plastic pumpkins...it seems from the end of August on, but I am probably exaggerating. Whatever original joy I got out of the whole idea of carving a face in a pumpkin has lonnnnnnnng gone away.
I suppose, based on the above, that I should dress as Scrooge-etta.
Happy Birthday ossobuco.
I tend to agree that as a children today are much more mature than when I was a child...they grow up too fast.
Also, a great deal of commercialism has taken over Halloween. Baby boomers enjoyed Trick or Treating so much as children, that they could not get enough of it. That's why the large volume of decorations and other Halloween paraphernalia we see today on store shelves.
