When I Was A Kid, I Gave All My Halloween Candy To My Parents
My family didn’t have any regulation for candy when I was little. While I watched my peers barter everything short of their souls for a Jolly Rancher, my parents bought me whatever chocolate bars and butterscotches that I wanted. I never learned the agony of begging my parents for more candy or hiding hastily bought M&M’s under my pillow because they said I could always have as much as I wanted.
One of my fondest memories as a little girl is walking to the ice cream truck that was always parked across the street from my elementary school. Towards the end of the day, the other kids and I would plan out the many suckers and types of bubblegum we would buy. My father always made sure that I had enough money for these ventures, adding extra “ice cream truck money” with my lunch money.
But with my parents well-intentioned laissez-faire approach to candy also came a disregard for how much I consumed. And when I inhaled an entire pack of Red Vines as a child, only to promptly to throw up, I developed a distaste for it altogether. From then on, I would only nibble lightly on See’s candy bars while the other kids in my class ate entire bags of gummy bears.
My disinterest in candy though mostly went unnoticed until Halloween when kids wallowed in their trick-or-treat loot like gold. Kids in my class would methodically plan out which candy they would eat on what days, trade unwanted candy with others, tasting new ones at lunch time and holding up wrappers to the sun to lick any remnants.
But I never ate my candy.
I loved Halloween as a kid and I loved embodying different characters. I loved the creativity of costumes and making them sometimes with my grandmother. But as far as the trick-or-treating went, I viewed it more as an opportunity to show off my costume to strangers than to get free candy.
Returning home after a night of stomping around the neighborhood, I always handed the sack to my parents who looked down into the bag of treats with skepticism. The bag usually sat somewhere in the living room for the remainder of the week before getting packed up into some closet. By Christmas, it would usually be thrown away.
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