I was a kid once…

…and boy, did I love me some candy!  Hershey’s bars, Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers – you name it, I drove my parents crazy on a sugar high from it.  Of course, holidays were the best time of all because not only was there a tendency to get cake and presents, but even candy too was showered on me by friends and relatives and mythical figureheads invented, as far as I could tell, solely and entirely for the purpose of providing candy and treats to good, little boys like myself!

I’ll be honest – Halloween was probably my third favorite holiday to be a kid.  Christmas and my birthday obviously took up the #1 and #2 slots, namely because on those days candy and presents are delivered directly to you, whereas for the likes of Halloween and Easter you actually have to go out and hunt for it yourself.  Trick or treating still managed to beat out Easter egg hunts, though, because at least you got to wear some sort of cool superhero costume while you were out prowling the night in search of fun-size M&Ms and Three Musketeers bars…

The point is that I know from firsthand experience that kids really look forward to Halloween – it requires a big investment from them to find just the right costume and in return, they deserve to be well compensated for their efforts … and I say this mostly because much to my chagrin, not all of my fellow adults seem to realize this. I know because I see them in the stores shopping for their Halloween candy, a couple of meager bags of the cheapest assorted junk candy that they can find – the kind that no kid in his right mind would dare try to trade with another at school the next day, the kind that kids don’t really get all that upset over even when the dog gets into it.

I don’t know how they do it – were they not young once themselves?!  When I find myself walking down those hallowed aisles, I see it as a responsibility to choose the best variety that my hard-earned money can buy!  I just couldn’t bear to imagine the look on their masked, little faces if I were to phone it in trying to pawn off some crap nickel candy that I wouldn’t have eagerly looked forward to looting myself many moons ago on this grand night of nights!  Sure, the good stuff may cost a little more, but really, who can put a price on a child’s happiness who spent the last three weeks begging his parents to let him dress up as Donatello, the best Ninja Turtle of them all … even though I’m honestly not sure if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are even popular these days anymore?!

Another angle to consider – happy kids typically result in much less raw egg one has to scrape off of his or her house the next day – trust me, it’s always better to be a little heavy on the treats than to wake up in the morning to find that you received an extra helping of tricks for being too stingy with that candy bowl…

My own personal mantra with regards to picking out Halloween candy for the kiddies is actually pretty simple – give what you would want to receive … unless you’re some sort of weirdo who doesn’t actually like candy, that is, and in that case, please consult your granddaughter for advice because I assure you that kids still don’t consider those nasty, orange circus peanuts to be “candy” any more than you did way back in the day! Other than that, it seems like it should be pretty straight forward – kind of like the golden rule, just like they teach kids about in school every single day!

Well, with a couple of specific provisions tagged on there for chocolate and sugar, anyways…

When you factor in that final perk of being a grown-up which states that basically anything leftover at the end of the night automatically defaults back to you, it really just seems like it would be icing on the cake for any candy-loving adult who looks forward to holidays like this as a wonderful excuse to enjoy veritable buckets full of chocolate liked a crazed madman without remorse long after the kiddies have left the streets and are driving their own parents nuts back at home!

But seriously … no, no – *I* definitely do it for the kids. In fact, I think I’d better pick up a couple of extra bags of these delicious, peanut butter pumpkins right now, just in case we happen to run out…

…you know, for the kids, of course…