Halloween 2008

Okay, so here is an odd confession... I have only had one Halloween in my life that I have not gone Trick-or-Treating... It was the Halloween that I was 19. When I was a kid, going was a given, then I got to be a teenager who was a stupendous baby-sitter and I took the kids I baby-sat trick-or-treating (I brought my own pillowcase still, of course!) And being in college at BYU (especially living in the dorms) is just being an over-glorified big kid, and they go trick-or-treating still. (Another interesting fact, that was in '96 and it was actually snowing as we were trick-or-treating ~ that was my first year in Utah and it really freaked me out to be having a snowy Halloween!)

Then when I was 19 I wasn't at BYU (I had come home for some knee surgeries) and I didn't have a baby sitting clientele to utilize, so I stayed home that year. My first year handing out the candy... how dull!

The next year I was 20 (yes, math was always one of my better subjects!), married, but no kids to take. Luckily for me though, I had been called into the Young Women's Program and we were in charge of doing a Halloween Carnival for our ward that year - so I got to play Halloween once again and enjoy the fruits, er, sweets of the season! Add to that the fact that I was 4 months pregnant, and everyone basically gave me all the chocolate I wanted! Halloween was back to being a fun holiday for me. I still didn't understand the whole "point" of the holiday (which I still don't to this day), but friends and family handing out free chocolate means I don't ask too many more questions than that!

And since then I have always had kids of my own to take with me. I don't have to carry my own pillowcase to collect my own candy now...oh no, I have just raised my kids to know that Mommy has to go through their candy before they get to eat any of it, and then we put all the candy together in a bowl (in an organized fashion!)to share with everyone in the family. They don't even question the thought having "their own" candy ~ it has always been a complete family possession. And I love it that way! I am building my own little army of candy-collecting minions!

So this year we followed our family tradition and went trick-or-treating with cousins. The only snag in our tradition is that now our closest cousins live almost an hour away! So by the time we got up to their place, it was already dark, almost 7 o'clock, and rainy! But, being the stalwart Halloween goers that we are, we still did some door-to-dooring. We made it about 20 minutes before Teagan gave up because she was wearing my shoes and they were too small and pinching her toes. So she got dropped off at the house to help her older cousin hand out candy. Then we made it almost an hour before the three little boys we had with us all needed to make potty breaks, which to us adults seemed like a perfect stopping point!

So, after just over an hour of Trick-or-treating how much candy do you think three kids could accumulate? Well, it was a lot! And I was curious... we had never had that much candy in our bags, so how much was it, really? After dealing with the crazy looks of my sister-in-law for actually wanting to weigh their candy, we weighed their bags and found out that they scored 15 pounds of candy!!!! Yikes! There were full sized candy bars, play-do, pencils, popcorn balls, cookies, doughnuts, tons of chocolate, and all sorts of other assorted goodies.

And as much as I love chocolate, I am a serious rationer - 2 pieces of candy a day is our limit for Halloween candies - one chocolate and one non chocolate. With 15 pounds, it was going to take us more than a full year to polish it off! So when we got home I went through all the candy, took out the yucky stuff and the bubble gum (we don't eat non-sugarless gum in our house, I'm not really know why, it coudn't be worse than sucking on a sugar-filled lollypop or eating a sugar-laden chocolate bar, but that was our rule as a kid, so it made it down to another generation! Silly, huh?!) and I filled a gallon sized ziploc up with candy to send to work with Scott to share with his students. Then we gave a grocery bag of candy to some other cousins who hadn't made out as well (candy wise) as we had. After all that, we still had two bowls of candy worth for us - one chocolate, and one non-chocolate, organized as only my type-A, quirk-filled self would push it to!


So, it was a good Halloween. Owen started out the night as Spiderman, but after 20 minutes he wanted back in his pumpkin shirt we made, and that was how he stayed for the rest of the night. Now we have enough candy to last us until next October when we will see how many pounds of candy they get, I think this will be a long term graphing experiment for me, to see the rise and fall of candy-scoring that takes place each year :-)