 In New York City, people would dress up in fanciful masks and costumes and roam the streets in merry-making mobs.By the beginning of the 20th century, these mobs had morphed into Ragamuffin parades consisting mostly of children dressed as "ragamuffins" in costumes of old and mismatched adult clothes and with deliberately smudged faces, but by the late 1950s the tradition had diminished enough to only exist in its original form in a few communities around New York, with many of its traditions subsumed into the Halloween custom of trick-or-treating.Abraham Lincoln's successors as president followed his example of annually declaring the final Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving.