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Halloween

30.Oct.2003

Today is Halloween, or, as I prefer to call it, Dental Deconstruction Day.

Tonight I get the pleasure of dressing my children up in costumes, walking them from house to house in our neighborhood and asking for candy. This candy will then be taken home in orange plastic pumpkins, dumped onto the living room floor in four separate enormous piles and counted. Yes, I said counted. Counted by one princess fairy, one tiger, one skateboarding dude and a teenage girl who, by definition, requires no costume.

I've been trying to figure out why my children have suddenly started counting their loot. I think I've come up with the reason.

Family tradition decrees that every Halloween night, after the ghosties, goblins and Britney Spears'es have collapsed from collective candy overload, Mommy and Daddy take their candy filled pumpkin buckets and hide them. By hiding them, I mean we dump them out in our bedroom and pick out the stuff that we want to eat. Generally we take up to half the contents of each bucket and then put the rest back into the grinning little plastic pumpkin heads. The following day, the buckets are returned to the children for a brief period of time so they can pick out a couple of pieces of candy.

Then we take the buckets back to our bedroom, dig through them and again take what we want.

This goes on for as long as the candy holds out, or until the kids forget about the buckets with the candy in them. You might not think they'd forget, but they do-er, did. Now that they're older, we're not so lucky in the candy forgetfulness department. The older ones are especially difficult to handle during our well-scripted plans to remove all memory of candy filled buckets from their collective memories. I think they might be on to us.
    Twelve-year-old son: "Mom? Where's my candy bucket?"
    Me: "Bucket? What bucket?"
    Twelve-year-old son: "Moooooooom! The plastic orange pumpkin that I had 347 and a half pieces of candy in last night!"
    Me: "347 and a half?"
    Twelve-year-old-Son: "I only ate half of a Snickers Bar."
    Me: "Oooooh, that bucket. Well, it was around here somewhere. Go ask your Dad, he might know."
    Twelve-year-old-Son: "I asked him and he told me to come ask you!"
This is of course, the old run around tactic. It's usefulness is short lived, but fun.

My sister uses a different method with her four children's candy cache. She lets them keep the buckets so they can eat the stuff until it's gone. This sort of strategy moves the candy through the little bodies at a much faster rate, which sometimes results in the body rejecting the candy later in the evening all over the carpet. It's for the sake of our carpeting that I don't subscribe to this method.

Have you ever tried to get a child down from a sugar high? It's akin to bringing a drunk down from, well.being drunk.
    Me: "Honey, just one stalk of broccoli, please? If you eat it, I promise you'll feel better."
    Seven-year-old: "Noooooooooooooooo", said as she swings from the Light fixture in her bedroom.
    Me: "A glass of milk? Just one sip? C'mon down from there! You're spilling your bucket of candy all over the place!"
    Seven-year-old: "Look! I can flyyyyyy!"
Halloween is such a fun time, with all the dressing up and the candy consumption. I'd tell you more about our secret plans to deprive our children of as much of their loot as possible, but first I need to go stick half of a Snicker's Bar back in my sons bucket.

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