growing up outside of town and spending my teenage years getting to many of my friend's houses in much more rural places, I do understand how trunk or treat could come about and make sense. hell, we used to get driven around from house to house in the country sometimes.

what I don't understand is when it's done in suburbia

Imagine if you took away most of the fun of Halloween, while keeping the purest most consumerist elements only (costumes from Disney IP and candy), and inserting religion, and pretty deliberately eroding (smaller the community the easier) the idea that Halloween is anything other than that, ruining the neighborhood's ability to enjoy it en masse by removing the literal kiddos for whom and around which the whole thing ought to revolve.

It's the kinda stuff we're doin' in a nutshell. Replacing anything decent that remains with a thin (always weirdly fearful/hateful) plastic shell, shaped almost like the thing, but the cheapest thinnest imitation of it, almost like a...

Well, you get it.

Fuck trunk or treat. May it be rightfully seen as the final true graveyard of "fun" culturally available to US children. Fittingly, the tombstones themselves, trunks of cars, rolling in on amazing loans, and parked, in lines, in church lots. Opened like caskets for the weirdest, grossest wake.

Everyfuckingwhere.

Folks gather at a parking lot (I think generally at a church or a school) and the kids go from car to car instead of house to house.

If you don't want your kid going around the neighborhood for, I don't know, reasons I guess.