When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #44

44-Trick or Treat! – Grocery bags of candy – taking some to work - Greedy Little munchkins!

Do you like to go out on Halloween and go trick or treating? I loved it when I was a kid! All that wonderful candy to eat! Yum! Yum!

We didn’t get as many kids that came by our house. Our house set back from the road about 50 feet. I guess they thought it was too far to walk. We had lights on so they could come but they hardly came to our door. We also put candles in paper bags that made luminaries. We would line the top of the house with them and down the driveway. It was very pretty to see all the bags lit.

One year my brothers and I went out to go trick or treating. My twin brother and I didn’t go out quite as late as my two older brothers. They got to stay out later because they were older. I just remember that this one particular year we all made ‘quite a haul of candy!’ It was wonderful! Well my dad got the bright idea that since we ‘had so much candy’ he wanted to take some of it to his office and share with his co-workers. I think our total haul was like a large grocery bag full of candy. We ate a lot that night. We ate till we were almost sick! The next morning when we looked over the loot we had left, we thought it looked a lot ‘smaller’ than it should. We asked what had happened to our candy? My mom told us that since we had so much, dad didn’t think we would mind if he took some of it to work to share.

Share??? Share with adults??? It never occurred to us that adults liked candy as much as kids did! We thought that was just awful! How terrible! He stole our candy! He never even asked us! My mom told dad about our grumblings and both of them told us what ‘greedy little kids’ we were! We had so much and had eaten a lot of candy and it certainly didn’t hurt us to share some. Well, we felt a little guilty for being so greedy. However, the following years he never took anymore of our ‘loot’ to work after that.

Now that I am writing about this I still feel badly that we were so selfish and greedy. But when you are a little kid, possession of candy is sacred!

This reminds me of when my own children went out to trick or treat. We always had them dump out all their candy to look it over to be sure there wasn’t anything harmful in it. Sad to say, but by this time, there were sick people out in the world that liked to put razor blades in apples and drugs in candy and stickers. When our kids poured out all their candy and after we checked it all over they got it all back. I always bought plenty of candy so that if they went out and did not get a lot there was plenty at home. The kids would trade with each other what they liked for what they didn’t like and it usually worked out well. I remember one year they all got a lot of penny Tootsie Rolls. None of them cared for them so I got to be the sole beneficiary of them! Oh Yum! Yum! I loved Tootsie Rolls! I even made a cute little teddy bear and showed them. They thought the teddy bear was cute but still didn’t care too much to eat Tootsie Rolls.

When we were living in Hawaii Douglas had made some cardboard tombstones and I helped him spray paint them gray and wrote epitaphs on them. We had pumpkins out and we had a dummy that hung by the front door and when kids came to ring the doorbell the hand reach out for them and the kids would scream! It was fun! We actually were hiding in the garage and through a window we could see the kids come up and we would work the hand on the dummy like a puppet. We had a lot of kids that came by. I decorated the inside of the house as well and I like to put up angel hair and hang spiders in them. I never bought ugly and freaky posters and characters. I bought cute posters and pumpkins and cats. I liked Halloween but I liked the ‘cute’ things. I did not want my kids having nightmare from the freaky and weird and ugly things.