“Re ur candy rules: U R A NO FUN MOM!!!!!”
That’s the verdict of a close friend of mine.
“It’s child abuse, I’m serious!”
That’s the verdict of a child of mine.
Apparently, I am the No Fun Mom. I am the spoiler of everyone’s Halloween, a treat tyrant who appears actually to enjoy denying children what is rightfully theirs.
“But it’s our candy!” the children have been complaining, pre-emptively.
“Only some of it,” I have been retorting.
This year we’ve restored a family policy governing how much candy children get to keep after Halloween, and no one’s happy about it.
Under this dispensation, they can gobble sweets while they’re out trick-or-treating. Once home, after they’ve spread their hauls out on the carpets and have gone through the delirium of sorting and trading, each child gets to keep his or her age in confections. If you are 9, you keep nine candies, and so on. That seems fair, doesn’t it?
Big chocolate bars count as one piece. So does, say, one repulsive jelly eyeball. This provision gives the children an incentive to keep the biggest pieces of plunder, which also happen to be the ones that most closely resemble actual food.
As for the rest: The vast, cascading, half-stale, brightly colored heap of what my grandfather called “tooth-rotten bellywash” goes the next day to Daddy’s office, where it vanishes.
“You are so mean,” the 5-year-old has been explaining to me every time the subject comes up.
“You are so right,” I’ve been telling her. “That just how parents are sometimes.”
(I say “parents” in the hope that some blame will attach to my husband, but, oddly, it never does. In their candy-crazed eyes, only one of us is the Sugar Nazi.)
This year Americans will be spending $5.8 billion on Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation, and from what I can see, an ever-increasing portion goes to candy. Every year, the supply ratchets up: The neighbors seem ever more generous, the pillowcases get heavier, sooner. The effect is of a tidal wave bearing down on children, a veritable tsunami of candy corn, Reese’s Pieces, Tootsie Rolls, Wonka Nerds, and Gummi Brains.
Little wonder that the No Funsters among us try to come up with regulatory systems that will allow children to enjoy Halloween without drowning them in high-fructose corn syrup.
With little ones, it’s easy: Shortly after trick-or-treating, the candy just “goes away,” as one mother described it, fluttering her fingers in the air.
Older children require sharper tactics: Some parents forbid hoarding, some pay children not to eat what they’ve collected. It’s become fashionable for dentists and orthodontists to offer loyalty-building Halloween candy buybacks.
Aw, I hear you say: Why not just let ’em keep their candy? Last year, we did. Never have we seen such industry: The children stayed out later and brought back more candy than ever before. The trouble is, they ate it. Blech.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
