In 1950, during the weeks that followed Halloween, employees at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF noticed that a stream of checks, for amounts big and small, had started to arrive in the organization’s mailbox. The checks were donations to support UNICEF’s work to help children in countries that were still recovering from the devastation wrought by the Second World War. The employees soon discovered that the contributions came from children who had collected coins while trick-or-treating on Halloween…

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Read more stories by Caryl M. Stern & Rajesh Anandan.