<P> In Scotland and Ireland, guising--children disguised in costume going from door to door for food or coins--is a traditional Halloween custom, and is recorded in Scotland at Halloween in 1895 where masqueraders in disguise carrying lanterns made out of scooped out turnips, visit homes to be rewarded with cakes, fruit, and money . The practice of guising at Halloween in North America is first recorded in 1911, where a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, Canada reported children going "guising" around the neighborhood . </P> <P> American historian and author Ruth Edna Kelley of Massachusetts wrote the first book - length history of Halloween in the US; The Book of Hallowe'en (1919), and references souling in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America". In her book, Kelley touches on customs that arrived from across the Atlantic; "Americans have fostered them, and are making this an occasion something like what it must have been in its best days overseas . All Halloween customs in the United States are borrowed directly or adapted from those of other countries". </P> <P> While the first reference to "guising" in North America occurs in 1911, another reference to ritual begging on Halloween appears, place unknown, in 1915, with a third reference in Chicago in 1920 . The earliest known use in print of the term "trick or treat" appears in 1927, in the Blackie Herald Alberta, Canada . </P> <P> The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but not trick - or - treating . Trick - or - treating does not seem to have become a widespread practice until the 1930s, with the first U.S. appearances of the term in 1934, and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939 . </P>

When did the term trick or treat first appear in print