The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat: A Halloween Book That Didn't Mail It In

There are a lot of books on the shelves of my children, ranging from tiny little board books from when they were infants all the way to 20-plus book series for beginner learners. But if I were to count up all of the books and decide which classification we have the most of, I'm almost positive it would be Halloween books. Berenstain Bears would be a close second. We have easily 20-plus Halloween books floating around the house, and I know this right now because my son has every single one of them pulled out onto his floor, wanting to read them every single night before Halloween.

Halloween is definitely one of the kids' favorite holidays. I think it's most kids' favorite holiday, honestly, for the obvious reasons. Costumes, treats, the idea of going out with friends, knocking on doors, decorations everywhere. My kids have been ready for Halloween for the last two months. The second it turned October 1st, we had to go up into the attic to pull out all of our Halloween decorations so they could start decorating. Halloween is just really huge around the Bookish Dad household, which means we pull out Halloween books quite frequently, and that includes The Berenstain Bears Trick or Treat.

Most of the Halloween books in our collection follow one of two common plot lines. One is the plotless Halloween book: the main character gets dressed up in a costume, goes out trick-or-treating, you see different costumes, you see candy, and the night ends. They're fine books. They get you in the spirit of Halloween. I'm thinking of books like Clifford's Halloween, where there's no moral of the story at all; it's just what is Clifford going to dress up as, and what is Halloween like in the world of the Big Red Dog. We have a countless number of books like this.

The other kind adds a little bit of a plot to it, and the plot is almost always that if you eat too much candy, you'll get sick. Which is very important stuff. That really is the biggest problem on Halloween: you get piles of candy and you're very likely to get sick if you just let your kids indulge in all of it at once.

Side note, really quick. Halloween candy is just way worse now than it was when I was a kid. Everything says chocolatey instead of chocolate. The reason I know this (maybe it's because my adult tastes have changed) is that whenever I sneakily sample my kids' candy, I always end up throwing half of it away because it tastes like trash. I really wish they would go back to candy just tasting good instead of changing the recipe because they assume kids can't tell the difference. They probably can't, but the parents can. Please help out the parents who sneak candy from their kids' baskets.

Mostly a standard Halloween plot, with one addition

The moral gets introduced early, when Brother tries to scare Mama Bear in his costume. She pretends to be afraid. He buys into it and says it's just me, Mama, and she says, well, appearances can be deceiving. I find this extremely funny, by the way. It's as if Mama Bear came into the house already knowing she wanted to teach some type of lesson to the cubs, and she just used this as her opportunity. It gets brought up again when the cubs are going through their trick-or-treating plan, which houses they're going to hit, which ones have the best candy, and they come to old Miz McGrizz, who is forbidding looking and therefore obviously a witch. Mama steps in saying what utter nonsense, even if she looks that way she's actually really nice, and we get more of the same lesson.

For most of the story, though, we just get the standard Halloween plot. Brother and Sister are going trick-or-treating by themselves, and Papa tells them it could be a little spooky out there. There's really no follow-up to this storyline. The moral isn't about independence or avoiding scary things or anything like that. It's just Papa being Papa. If you've read enough Berenstain Bears books you know he likes Halloween. He likes the scariness of it; we saw the same thing in Ghost of the Forest, where he was the one trying to scare the cubs.

So the cubs go out. They meet up with Too-Tall and his gang, who are looking to toilet-paper Miz McGrizz's house. She catches them beforehand, not red-handed exactly, and invites them in for candy apples, and Brother and Sister realize she actually is really nice. Then later on Papa comments on the delicious-looking candy apples, learns they came from Miz McGrizz, and calls her an old grouch puss, which lets Sister turn the lesson around on him: appearances can be quite deceiving.

It was just the last review where I talked about this typical Berenstain Bears ending, where the cubs prove they've learned their lesson by teaching it to somebody else, and we get it here in its purest form.

Also, Papa is being pretty mean to Miz McGrizz. Has he ever met her? Does he know it's probably inappropriate to call her that in front of the cubs? Anyways, I'm guessing Mama Bear is going to give him a talking to later that night as well.

In terms of the plot, this is definitely one of the more simplistic Berenstain Bears books. It was only about an eight and a half minute read. There's not a lot to it. It has its moral, but other than that it fits the typical Halloween trope: put on your costume, go out trick-or-treating, get candy, come home. Nothing overly exciting happening from a plot perspective.

The lesson is a good one

It's a nice lesson for kids. It's not one of the most important problems kids get confronted with, but there are versions of it that ring true to me. Somebody with a disability, for instance; it's easy for kids to want to stare or question whether there's something different about them, and the lesson that the way somebody looks doesn't have any bearing on who they are is a really great one for cubs to learn. And it's delivered in a nice, fun way with Halloween.

Kid engagement is really great too, though Halloween is carrying a lot of the weight there. There's not much this book needs to do outside of just being a Halloween book to get my kids excited. They love looking at the candy, and they love thinking about Too-Tall's line:

Oh, you might say we're going to put the trick back in trick-or-treat.

It makes them think. It makes them wonder if that's actually an option. Dad, talk to us about this trick thing they're doing. And then we get to give the lesson that toilet-papering houses is bad, Too-Tall is being mean, how would you like it if your house got toilet-papered and you had to clean it up, that kind of thing.

Candy, costumes, and spooky trees

Illustration-wise, this one is very fun to go through. I love the candy. Any Berenstain Bears book that has candy in it always looks super appetizing, and I now have a hankering for caramel apples, or as they call them, candy apples. I don't know if that's the exact same thing as a caramel apple. They're colored red, so maybe it's a different type of covering on the apple. Anyways.

We also get a lot of bears in costumes. Brother bought the spookiest monster mask he could find, and the mask they drew is basically a devil. Sister is a ballerina. Too-Tall, of course, is dressed as a robber, and one of his gang members is a sleazy-looking magician. The other two I'm less sure about; they're more just gang members, I guess.

And we get a lot of the typical Berenstain Bears spookiness, which I want to talk about a little more because I think it's an interesting way they do it. Obviously the scenes are dark, they're outside, and the trees are drawn in a particularly spooky manner, curled and bent and leafless and dead-looking. The reason I like this so much is that it's almost as if we're seeing the world through the bears' eyes. When you're a kid and you go outside and it's dark, everything just looks scarier than it actually is, and that's the way the book is illustrated. You can feel as if you're in the bears' position: getting caught up with Too-Tall, going down a lane you don't recognize at first and then realizing it's Crooked Lane, down to Miz McGrizz's house, the witch. Being afraid, but also a little invigorated by the energy of Halloween.

I also love Too-Tall getting caught in the middle of his shenanigans, and then all of them just waddling in and getting their candy apples. I feel like I've been in this position before, where there are kids doing mischief, you're the adult who steps in, and all of a sudden everyone is behaving really well.

Does it stand out from the Halloween pile?

So is this one of their classics? No. What makes a Berenstain Bears book a classic is when it stands out from the crowd of other books similar to it. Take one of the earlier dad picks, The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies, which stands out as one of the best examples of a story about greediness. Does this book stand out from other Halloween books the same way? It doesn't. That said, in classic Stan and Jan fashion, they wove in an additional moral that isn't really Halloween specific but works really well in a Halloween context, and that's what gives it the essence of a Berenstain Bears book. They didn't just say, ah, it's a Halloween book, we don't have to put any effort into it. They clearly still wanted to make a quality book, and I appreciate them for that.

For dad readability, I could pull this book out anytime. I actually know some families who take their holiday books and hide them during the rest of the year because they don't want to read them out of season. I could see that for some holidays. I don't know if I always want to be reading Thanksgiving books; it's great to talk about giving thanks, but those books get a little dry. Not the case for Halloween books. These stay out all year round and get pulled off the shelf all year round, by me, by Bookish Mom, or more likely than not by the kids, who want to be thinking about Halloween even when Halloween is eight months away. They still like planning what their costume is going to be, the route they're going to take, all the candy they're going to get. You would think a Berenstain Bears book specializing in Halloween wouldn't come out that much. It does.