When I think of Halloween, I think hot dogs. People tend to find this association odd, some are even angered by it, but to me it feels perfectly natural. When I was younger, my mother used to grill hot dogs in our driveway for the trick or treaters and dole out beer in red plastic cups to the adults, providing a bit of a respite for parents whose kids were running around the neighborhood injected with copious amounts of sugar.
I was never much of a walker and I never got off on travelling in packs (why I live in New York I don't know), but even more importantly, I loved and still adore a good hot dog. Essentially, this ritual made my Halloween quite perfect.
The ritual ended, sadly, when I moved to New York to go to college. There are very few driveways in Manhattan, and there is a bar or a Gray's Papaya on every street corner, so if people need a beer or a frank, they are basically set year round. Nobody shared my passion for hot dogs at Halloween, unless they were terribly after drunk taking too many orange jello shots at some themed downtown party, in which case that little beef wonder became something of a valuable commodity, a bonafide savior in fact.
Jack Benny (who was famously cheap and made fun of himself for it) gave out silver dollars on Halloween. 
There’s nothing like Halloween in New York City. New York is home to some of the most artistic and creative people on the planet, most of whom will jump at any opportunity to put on a show. Consider the city’s eight hundred thousand drag queens, who, just to take a trip out to the deli, will put on seven-inch platforms, a sequined butterfly shawl and a two-foot wig. In the weeks before Halloween, the whole city began to fill with a fizzy, randy excitement. Shop windows were crammed with bondage gear, feather boas, broquaded undies and outrageous wigs, and the window boxes of the West Village overflowed with chrysanthemums and pumpkins and squash—all in their final bursts of color before the decay of the winter set in. And all those flamboyant colors; all those sequins, feathers and rubber masks started to bring out everyone’s inner drag queen. And it was no different for the dog people. There are more that thirty dog runs in the city, and therefore more than thirty annual doggie costume parades.
It was Halloween
1976 and the movie showing in town that week was "Carrie." Back then it
didn't really matter what was playing because my Mother and her best
friend, Mrs. Mary Lynde had made a pact, which is still standing to
this day and I think it went like this, "We will go out every Saturday
night with our husbands, first meeting at one of our houses to have two
Jack Daniels and diet Sprite and then to a restaurant without any of our
children." It's only been in the past few years that I have been
invited out with them on an occasional Saturday night.