Another Halloween night has come and gone, and with it the trick-or-treaters, from tots accompanied by their parents to older children making their annual rounds. 

In Napa for our 13th Halloween celebration, we transplanted New Yorkers not only marvel at the colorful and unique costumes but also at the children’s behavior, which is first-rate. There seems to be no malice aforethought in the minds of our kids. No “Put up or else” attitudes, no mild form of extortion, just good kids having fun.

As for the costumes, store-bought or homemade, they are something to behold.

For example, the local Party Time novelty store, in a colorful insert in the Register, offered more than 300 unique costumes, from a “Happy Duck” for tots, going at $33 a pop, to an older girls’ “Sequined Flapper” outfit, for a mere 80 bucks! What recession?

When grandsons Robbie and Phil arrived on their Halloween rounds, Robbie was wearing an aviator’s leather cap and goggles and an old Army Air Force leather jacket once worn by the grandpa on his dad’s side, who Robbie never met.

Phil — a laugh-filled and witty boy — wore a $30 store-bought Dark Reaper costume. Why that outfit I’ll never know.

With Halloween now officially over, I thought of other times and other kids.

A Napa neighbor, Stan Laskin, e-mailed a story of his days growing up in Cochecton Center, in upstate New York, in the desperate 1930s. His school, 10 miles from home, was a two-story building in Narrowsburg where kids from first grade through high school learned their ABCs and then some.

Stan recalled a Halloween prank that was right up there with the best of them. One Halloween night some very daring and strong high school juniors and seniors had borrowed an old junkyard relic, a Model T Ford. The boys disassembled the relic, hauled it to the empty school and with a ladder somehow hauled the junked car up and onto the school’s roof, where the young experts reassembled it.

The next school day, kids, the principal and teaching staff looked in shock and awe at the Model T Ford parked proudly on the school’s roof.

That was the day a very wise and cool principal held a morning assembly and calmly warned the perps that if the car was still on the school’s roof the following day they would rue the day they were born.

The next day, the car was gone. Some very talented and very strong juniors and seniors undid their dastardly deed overnight.

The police were never called and a great Halloween prank had been corrected.

Then “Brooklyn Joe” Hennessey, another Napa pal, reminded me of our old town’s custom of celebrating Halloween.

We New York City kids would raise hell on Halloween night, no treats involved. We’d ring doorbells, remove swinging iron gates from in front of houses and run down girls brave enough to stray outside their doors with nylon stockings filled with flour. Dumb, but that’s what boys did.

Weeks later, on Thanksgiving morning, we ragamuffins would once more ring doorbells — this time with an “Anything for Thanksgiving?” to the same people we victimized less than a month earlier.

No wonder we got such cold receptions and so little in the way of treats dropped into the paper bags we carried.

As I look back now I finally realize that we got it all wrong!

 Ev Parker can be reached at evjenpar@mailbug.com or 224-9956.