I love Halloween. I really do.

As a kid, a thousand years ago, I always loved the idea of dressing up, going to the neighbor’s homes, and announcing: “Trickertreat.”

Instead of calling the cops, the smiling neighbors would open their doors, admire your costume, make a silly joke, and give you a hand full of goodies. In our neighborhood, merchants sponsored a festival and invited kids to paint a masterpiece on their big storefront windows. They awarded prizes in various categories. I never won, although my parents said we should have at least finished in the top 10.

In the evening, there was a costume parade. One year, my mother, a very clever woman, spent two weeks crafting a costume for me, brother Jason and sister Mandy. Back before we all had TV sets, we all went to the movies, and before the feature played, they would run a short newsreel called “The March of Time.”

Mom played off that newsreel and made a trio of giant alarm clock costumes. We marched in the parade behind a banner that proclaimed we were the “March of Time.”

It was a great, very clever idea. It was so clever it went over the heads of the audience and judges who ignored it and awarded the prize to a scarecrow and a mermaid. Years later, after Mom died, we moved into her house. In a dusty corner of the attic, I found the clock costumes and the “March of Time” banner.

Later, when we were in the sixth or seventh grade, we were allowed to go “Trickertreatin” with our friends without adult supervision. Carrying shopping bags to stash the cookies, popcorn, apples, and candy, we set out in the dark.

Because there were no parents present to ration out the treats, it meant we could gobble up the goodies, especially candy.

As a young teenager, I was with some of the neighborhood boys when we decided it would be great sport to pull a trick on a neighbor. Our trick of choice involved eggs.

Yes, we pitched eggs on the front door of Miss C’s home and ran. By the time we got home, Miss C, a lovely retired schoolteacher, had called my mother and informed her of our “trick.” Mom greeted us at the door with a stern glare, a bucket of hot soapy water, and a brush. Then she suggested we go back to Miss C’s home and clean up the mess.

Later, when I was the father of a pair of young boys, we went “Trickertreatin” and stopped at her home. She invited the boys in, commented on their costumes, and handed out hot, homemade cookies. She laughed as we spoke of the night I spent cleaning broken eggs off her porch.

In a few years, Halloween changed.

As a young reporter, I was assigned to the police station one Halloween night to pick up any news. I was sitting in my office, tucked into the back of the police station, listening to the police radio, when the phone rang.

It was the shift commander, the inspector. “Gelarden, get down here. Now,” he said.

I hustled down to his office, where he was sitting with a couple of patrolmen and a sergeant. On his desk was a collection of apples and cookies and a cupcake or two.

The inspector snapped at me. “Look at this. What kind of a (here he described the person using a word that is normally not printed in a family newspaper), would do this to a bunch of kids?”

Then he pointed to the apples and cookies and cupcakes. They had been boobytrapped to injure anyone who would bite into them.

I don’t remember if they ever caught the idiot who passed out the boobytrapped goodies, but I am sure if they had, he would not have made it to the city lockup without a first-rate collection of bumps and bruises.

After that Halloween, parents, fearful that boobytrapped apples and cookies could harm their children, always accompanied their costumed ghosts and goblins as they gathered loot.

And that was the end of the era of unsupervised kids filling their shopping bags with homemade goodies.

Almost overnight, it seemed that churches and neighborhoods and community centers began to host Halloween parties where kids could dress up, celebrate the season, and be safe.

That is where we are today. Parents no longer make their kids’ outfits. They go to the store and buy glow in the dark dragons, along with made overseas costumes that sparkle and shimmer. But on Halloween night, only a few tiny costumed goblins will prowl the streets. Safety first, you know.

Chances are, we won’t get any tiny pirates, or scary ghosts, seeking goodies at our house this year.

And we will miss ’em.