Halloween Madness

The day before Halloween, we had a "Trunk-or-Treat" with our ward. The party was held at the church, had activities and chili first, then ended with passing out candy in the parking lot. Henry had no interest in going car to car for treats, but ended up helping Nick pass out candy from our undecorated trunk. Henry is wearing an elephant costume, which is even cuter when he wears the hood part of it. I wore my Snow White dress, Nick wore clothes. To the kid getting candy: Where's your costume? Holding a toy sword is not a costume.

On Halloween, we were totally surprised by the volume of trick-or-treaters. Our neighbor had warned us, "We go through bags and bags of candy, then pretend we're not home." As a result, I bought what I thought was a lot of candy. I bough a few bags of fun size bars, some bags of bite size bars, and then as back-up, a couple hundred suckers. The trick-or-treating started as 3:30, and about 6:30, we turned off our lights and pretended to be not at home because all of the candy was gone. We spent about $70 on candy and had still run out. The saddest part of it was there was no candy for us to eat- no leftovers, and Henry had never collected any.

We estimate we had between 450-500 trick-or-treaters. One odd thing- a lot of adults were collecting candy. I don't know if it's something lost in cultural translation, but I thought it was just for kids. So a lot of adults would have their own bag for collecting that they'd put out for their treat, in addition to their toddler's treat bag. We had a few adults who had no kids in sight. I'm a little astonished by that. Of course, you always get kids and teens who you think, "aren't they a little old for this?" but I guess in this area, age knows no limits.

This neighborhood goes all out for Halloween. A lot of families have really elaborate decorations for the holiday, and in the past the neighborhood has even done a two block long spook alley. So between that and the front doors being only thirty feet apart, it makes us the perfect Halloween destination. We could quickly tell that the vast majority of our visitors were not from this neighborhood. For one thing, our tiny 6-block neighborhood doesn't have 500 kids total. But also the ethnicity of our visitors didn't match the demographics of the neighborhood.

So next year, we will buy more candy and we may still run out of it before the night is over.