One theory holds that it was the excessive pranks on Halloween that led to the widespread adoption of an organized, community-based trick-or-treating tradition in the 1930s.
The Great Depression exacerbated the problem, with Halloween mischief often devolving into vandalism, physical assaults and sporadic acts of violence. By the 1920s, however, pranks had become the Halloween activity of choice for rowdy young people, sometimes amounting to more than $100,000 in damages each year in major metropolitan areas. In the early 20th century, Irish and Scottish communities revived the Old World traditions of souling and guising in the United States. The sentences and vocabulary are simple, but finding them on the page is the challenge here.īig fun for new readers who are ready to turn their Where’s Waldo skills to finding text.It’s Halloween: Trick-or-Treating in the United States: Some American colonists celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, and in the mid-19th century large numbers of new immigrants, especially those fleeing the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s, helped popularize Halloween.
While this clever conceit is carried out with accessible text, there is a little quibble: the saturation and intentional busyness of the illustrations leaves little rest for new readers’ eyes. The reveal at the conclusion is that Big Bunny is not a giant but a large helium balloon of the sort seen in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Shifting perspective and scale make it clear that the creature is not just another one of these animals, and many readers will use the title and cover image to infer that they belong to the eponymous Big Bunny. Their stark whiteness makes them stand out on the pages, which depict a busy, vibrant setting reminiscent of those in Richard Scarry books and are likewise populated by anthropomorphic animals going about their days. These named body parts belong to a figure that isn’t wholly visible until the book’s end, provoking readers to search them out in the detailed images. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Big Bunny!Ĭontrolled, repetitive text invites children to read short sentences directing them to find “a foot…a hand…a tail,” and so on.
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