"Happy" Halloween: What Is It With This Town?

Before jumping into the bigger issues I promised to cover in the last post, I first must rant about a subject closer to home. It's getting cold here in the Midwest; leaves are falling, pumpkins are grinning, and the candy is selling as we get ready for Halloween. Kids across the nation are looking forward to scampering about for hours after dark on the 31st of this month...but not in our particular Iowan small town.
Here, we do not celebrate Halloween, but instead uphold a bizarre tradition called "Beggar's Night". Beggar's night is the designated trick-or-treating night here, in a place where trick-or-treating cannot, and will not, take place on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays or Wednesdays, and also has a curfew beginning at 7:30 pm, before it even really gets dark out. I don't know exactly what happens if you get caught trick-or-treating after 7:30, but I've never seen anyone here try to stay out later that 7:20. When I ask the locals why Halloween festivities are so darn restricted, they tell me that trick-or-treating is not allowed on Wednesdays or Sundays because said days are religious, (Wednesday? Really? Why?)* and that, if children dared venture out on a Friday or Saturday, they would immediately be set upon by packs of homicidal college students, even though, during the rest of the week, the college kids seem pretty docile, and the children would be well away from the in the suburbs. As for the curfew? No one can say. You are free to stay out late on Beggar's night, so long as no one is slipping you candy.
This place has an extremely low crime rate, so I can't figure out what exactly is going on here. Killjoys on the city council? Bizarre religious traditions? Fear of witchcraft? If anyone out there has any explanation for Beggar's night and its weird customs, please enlighten me. Because this whole this is actually starting the get me really irritated. WHY? WHY?!?!

*And yes, Iowans, at least in our town, attend church on Wednesdays.