7 Fall Traditions Kids Today Barely Experience Anymore

The seven autumnal traditions below each receded for different reasons—an ordinance, a bankruptcy filing, a poll with a number attached, a line of federal statute that struck four words and inserted four others among them. All were once ordinary, but are now rare enough that an average kid would need them explained.Burning the leaf pile at the curbRaking the whole yard into one giant leaf pileJugs of unpasteurized cidersWalking to school with nobody watchingThe original picture day package your mother orderedTrick-or-treating in the actual darkGoing out on Halloween without a parentBurning the leaf pile at the curbBurning leaf pile | Satsuei_athian / ShutterstockWhen people say they miss how autumn used to smell, they’re usually talking about the smell of smoke from burning leaf piles, a practice that has been banned in many places across the United States. New Jersey's air code forbids disposing of fallen leaves by open burning. In 1982, Minnesota barred every city in the seven-county Twin Cities metro from even passing an ordinance permitting the practice, and New York’s own ban went statewide in 2009. Southern California got there first thanks to a rule adopted in October 1976. In general, the practice has long been frowned upon; the EPA's leaflet on residential leaf burning, out in October 1992, informed readers that the practice was illegal in many communities.Raking the whole yard into one giant leaf pileFallen leaves raked into pile | maxbelchenko / ShutterstockBefore burning piles of leaves, you had to create them, usually with a rake—but that process has become much less common. By 1994, 27 states and Washington, D.C., banned all or some yard trimmings from land disposals. Pennsylvania's ban took effect on April 9, 1988, prompting communities to develop alternative ways to handle leaves. A turf specialist writing in Weeds Trees & Turf in January 1989 complained that it was hard to buy a mower that didn't bag, but still, yard trimmings landfilled nationally fell from roughly 27 million tons in 1980 to 10.5 million in 2018. Jugs of unpasteurized cidersApples next to jug of sparkling cider | SOLDATOOFF / ShutterstockCider is still a very common October tradition, but the jug you carry out from your visit to the cider mill is a different product than the one your parents bought. Starting September 8, 1998, unpasteurized apple cider had to carry a warning that it might contain bacteria capable of causing serious illness in children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. The FDA went further with a January 19, 2001 ruling that demanded a 5-log reduction in pathogens—a 99.999 percent kill—from anyone selling past their own counter. These changes put a small seasonal cider operation's first-year compliance at $24,700 to $36,700, with most of that extra cash going to the pasteurizer. New York later mandated cider pasteurization outright, and the state’s licensed cider producers fell from 181 in 2005 to 120 six years later. Walking to school with nobody watchingYoung child walking to school in autumn | Nicoleta Ionescu / ShutterstockIn 1969, 48 percent of American children in kindergarten through eighth grade usually walked or biked to school, and by 2009, that figure had fallen to 13 percent. Distance explains part but nowhere near all of that, because among children living less than a mile from their schools, the share who walked or biked fell from 89 percent to 35 percent. There are also fewer buildings to walk to today, with the country having consolidated 117,108 public school districts in 1939-40 down to 13,318 by 2022-23. Congress responded to all this by securing billions for the Safe Routes to School program, which launched in 2005 and aims to make walking and biking to school safer and more accessible for children. The original picture day package your mother orderedPicture day still happens at schools around the country, though the largest company in the business may be actively coming apart. Lifetouch shoots school photos at more than 50,000 schools each year, but its revenue slid three years running before it sold—$1.02 billion in fiscal 2015 down to $964 million in fiscal 2017, at which point the employee-owned firm was bought by Shutterfly for $825 million. The company cut roughly 800 jobs in January 2021, and sales territories declined from 180 to 90. In 2023, a Minnesota plant shuttered, resulting in 246 layoffs, and the business’s high school accounts were sold off in August 2025.Trick-or-treating in the actual darkKids dressed up for Halloween in 1991 | melissamn / ShutterstockThe Halloween in your memory is probably darker than the one your kids experience, and that is a matter of federal law. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 ended daylight saving time on the last Sunday in October, so most years, the 31st arrived after the clocks had already fallen back. Section 110 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 struck "last Sunday of October" and inserted "first Sunday of November," effective in 2007, moving Halloween permanently inside daylight saving time. Safety researchers had pushed for that for years, with one 1995 study estimating that 727 pedestrian deaths might have been avoided over five years if year-round daylight saving time had been implemented.Going out on Halloween without a parentTrick or treater with pumpkin candy basket | Vita_Dor / ShutterstockTrick-or-treating is still nearly universal, but doing it unsupervised is not. When the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital polled parents of 9- to 11-year-olds in August 2023, only 15 percent said they had ever let their child trick-or-treat with friends and no adult along. 54 percent worried someone might scare or follow their child, while17 percent called their own streets unsafe. Walking to a friend's house alone, at 33 percent, was twice as likely to be permitted.