This will be my sixth year trick-or-treating. Here’s what I’ve discovered

Halloween offers up a portal for neighbours to connect – even if it is only once a yearHalloween is a delight for children and gives parents a chance to connect Having only come to trick-or-treating late, as a parent, I’ve been thinking about how this centuries-old tradition opens up something that’s missing in our modern lives.As a country kid, my Halloween nights looked inward. We would pull the curtains tight on the encroaching darkness outside. I’d scrunch my eyes closed, preparing for the cold, and hold my breath before dunking my whole face in a basin of water. Sometimes I’d emerge victorious – with a golden 20p coin caught between my teeth. (You’ve got to love 1980s health and safety.)But for my townie friends, Halloween brought them outwards, wandering the roads and paths of their streets and estates. They roamed in packs, wearing their not-so-firesafe plastic bag costumes and old-school masks tied with string. As well as trick-or-treating from friendly neighbours they already knew, they would prise open the squeaky gates of those they rarely saw, with shaking fingers pressing the doorbell. When the doors opened they would peer inside the porch, hoping for apple drops not apples. And grabbing before running. There were no adult chaperones – it was safety in numbers.Raising townie kids of my own, I was horrified the first year my husband suggested we bring them knocking on our neighbours’ doors asking for sweets.READ MOREWe live in a well-heeled Dublin suburban town. And we are both blow-ins. You nod at your nearest neighbours. You might even chat when there’s a crisis – like an electricity outage or an annoying alarm. You only knock on their door when a delivery driver has left a parcel. But beyond the occasional comment about the weather, it’s strictly business. As for those more than three doors away – they may as well live in the next county.This is not the world many of us grew up in. There were cups of tea in neighbours’ houses, staring up at the light around their sacred heart pictures, wondering when the adults will ever stop talking. We were sent next door to borrow a lawnmower or a big ladder. And there was always time to stop for a chat or to gladly take a digestive biscuit and a glass of orange squash.Perhaps the difference is the way of today’s family life for many of us urban-dwellers. When both parents work full-time, days feel full to the brim with swimming, martial arts, homework, birthday parties and school events. The minutes in between are filled with emails, WhatsApp messages and more late-night doomscrolling than I care to admit. There is barely enough left in the week for us to enjoy hanging out as a family, and rarely do we get to meet our own friends. So who in the world has time for cups of tea and chinwags with random neighbours?Thus the thoughts of knocking on the doors of neighbours in those fancier houses on the next street with the big gates and long front gardens made me feel like a travelling salesman.[ Fashion Irish childrenswear just got a whole lot more interestingOpens in new window ]But like any good door-to-door seller knows, you put your shiniest product first. And so I pushed my very cute children/ monsters to the door, pressing the bell they couldn’t reach and stepping away.This year will be my sixth trick-or-treat. After pressing dozens of doorbells and banging all sorts of knockers and successfully filling many buckets of sweets, here’s what I’ve discovered. My children are almost always met with big smiles. And enormous baskets of sweets and crisps, some thoughtfully prepared in hand-painted bags. There’s nearly always a kind word, a question about school, an “ooh” and “ahh” for their costume. And there’s a wave and a little chat with Mammy – who has now taken to wearing a spooky hat or headband for the occasion. We’ve met delighted toddlers, nostalgic parents whose teenage children have grown out of trick-or-treating, elderly people missing their grandchildren abroad and a group of giddy nuns only delighted that my atheist children rang on their doorbell.[ Why Halloween pumpkins are smaller this year, and three viral hacks to carve themOpens in new window ]And as a naturally nosy journalist, I do like to get a peek inside the hallways: from designer glass tables to Ikea shoe cupboards, polished concrete floors to linoleum and seeing which multimillion Victorian house is so cold the owner is wearing layers of woollen jumpers.But the insight I mainly love is getting to meet the people who live in my wider neighbourhood. There is something reassuring about getting to see the goodness and kindness in the people who have randomly purchased or rented homes near my house. And for my excited children, it’s one of the highlights of their year. And it’s not just the mountainous sweet haul. For thousands of years Halloween or Samhain has been celebrated as a portal. The one time of year when the boundary between the living and the dead grows thin, when ghosts and ghouls fly around our mortal world.Trick-or-treating feels like a different sort of portal. When the sun rises on November 1st, the distant neighbours in my south Dublin suburb will return to being strangers. We will not knock on their door for a chat. They will not stop my kids in the street to ask them how their school day was. We will, like my 1980s rural Irish Halloween, return to looking inward, keeping ourselves to ourselves.But every Halloween night I wonder. What would it be like if the trick-or-treat portal stayed cracked open just a little bit? If we stopped and smiled and had a little word about our day and the weather, would our overscheduled insular lives really collapse with the weight of it? Or would we all feel just a little more connected.IN THIS SECTION