What happened to Halloween?

Not commercially, decorations in the store still go up a month early, candy is stuck out into the isles by the truckload and there's all kinds of scary/happy costumes.

I mean residential-wise. When my parents first bought their house, and we went trick-or-treating, EVERY SINGLE HOUSE was freaking lit for sugar (barring the 1 or 2 ppl who had to work or were Halloween scrooge's). Fast forward 9 years. No lights. AT ALL. My son's dad's mom informed me their church was doing a Trunk-Or-Treat. Which was totally awesome. Zach got to dress up, go somewhere really safe that everyone knew us, play in the jumping castle, play games, and circle a little parking lot about 8times to get all the candy (you keep circling till all the candy's been given out).
If it hadn't been for this event, Zach wouldn't have gotten to trick-or-treat, i shit you not there were a total of 11 houses with lights on from my trek from work by the Rita Ranch area, to my Mom's stella/Kolb area, to the church Speedway/Houghton-ish area. ELEVEN. Out of HUNDREDS of houses we passed there were ELEVEN. That's just sad. And I saw a whopping 3 groups of kids (not including teenagers).

As this is the first time in years that I've been able to take Zach trick-or-treating (it's always on his dad's visitation days), I was very disappointed. My best friend did inform me that it was possibly due to the TIME we were out. I didn't get of work till 6pm, and we didn't get back from the church till about 830pm. My friend informed me that about 5yrs ago there was a law or something passed, maybe a 'volunteer' curfew, that you're now supposed to go out before dark, but have to have kids home at full dark. This being due to poor little kids getting snatched. I didn't know of this because I haven't been the one taking Zach out for it. But I had splurged and gotten an extra bag of candy to hand out, but as it was 830pm when i got home, there were no knocks or rings to alert me to happy sugar-high little kids. halloween was already over by then.

I remember staying out till 9pm and still getting candy. Wtf is happening that this doesn't happen anymore? I think I officially want to move to a "small town" were everybody knows everybody and this kind of trick-or-treating is still possible. This year sucked because it really wasn't anything like what it used to be, but hey, I got to take him trick-or-treating and he DID get about 6lbs of candy from the event.
So no house-to-house, but candy was still had. I guess it was still a success then lol.