2020, Family, Food, Health, Kids, Seasons, Uncategorized

A Day Without Candy….

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Friends asked me.  Facebook folks asked me.  I saw the question online in multiple places.  Even Nonny asked me.  “What are you doing for Halloween this year?”  Nobody wants to just give up on Halloween but at the same time, nobody wants to be taking any chances either.

We decided to do a slightly modified evening.  Normally the kids come up on the steps, I stand just inside the porch (with a dog gate up) and put two or three pieces of candy in each child’s bag.  But somehow that didn’t seem quite right for me to handling candy that I’ve just touched.

I found some cute orange and white bags online and I filled them with four pieces of candy each and some inexpensive Halloween stickers that I found last month at Michaels.  I tied them up with orange ribbon that I had on hand.  The bags have been “quarantining” (or should it be “sheltering in place”) in my closet in a bag for the last three weeks.  Tonight I will dump all the bags into a big orange bowl and when (if?) the kids come up I will hold out the bowl and say “take one”. 

I don’t even know if we will have trick-or-treaters.  For the past 10 years I’ve had between 20-24 visitors; I made 30 little bags because that’s how much candy I had.  The big change this year is that I only used candy that I like so that if we have bags leftover, at least it will what I like!

Are you giving out candy this year?  Do you give out what you like or don’t like?  Anything special you like on Halloween?

63 thoughts on “A Day Without Candy….”

  1. I remember a Lynne Rosetto Kasper broadcast in which she said, “I think when God invented Snickers, he got it just about right.” Since Halloween falls just before the pheasant hunting season, my practice was to buy far more little Snickers bars than our neighborhood spooks, goblins and pirates could possibly consume. The leftovers were welcome treats in November when I was slogging through snowdrifts pursuing rooster pheasants.

    All of that is just a memory now. Halloween does not come to this place where I live, nor did it come even in those days before the virus forced us to hide in our rooms in a building where children are almost never seen.

    What seems saddest of all is that my family will not risk celebrating Thanksgiving. Worse, I think it is unlikely we will gather for Christmas. In the family I was born into and the family I later made, Christmas was the brightest day of the year. Not this year.

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    2. Yes, sad about holidays. YA and I have made the decision that we are not joining our friends up north for Thanksgiving. First time in her life.

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      1. VS, would you be interested in a drive-by gift exchange this year on Christmas? It could be fun. Different, but really fun. I think I will need a big distraction from what will not be happening. If you are, email me and we can plan, plan, plan. If not, that is OK, too.

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  2. I used to give out candy, but gave it up after maybe ten years or so. Halloween so often fell on a weeknight, and I was coming home from work with trick or treaters following me up the sidewalk, no time to even get my jacket off, much less get myself something to eat before the deluge.

    I will probably go out tomorrow and buy some markdown candy for myself. I’m sort of fond of Hershey’s miniatures.

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    1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

      My response is virtually identical to Linda’s response, and for the same reasons.

      VS, I love your little bags and I think it is ingenious. I am also all in about Steve’s comment regarding Lynn Rosetta Kasper and Snickers. However, the next essential step for the small bars is to freeze them, which seems to add extra lusciousness.

      This year I forbid Lou from buying any candy. We both have a sweet tooth. I really need to knock it off. Between COVID boredom and election anxiety I have no impulse control about sweets right now, which means having nothing available to me in the house. Many people in my dad’s family develop Type II diabetes, and I would love to avoid that particular experience.

      Should anyone come by our house tonight for Tricks or Treats, which I doubt, we will be hiding in the basement with all the upper level lights off. I think I will start a jigsaw puzzle tonight—time to entertain myself more fully. I will ask Lou or Santa Claus to get me a new puzzle for Christmas, but that we be an AZ project.

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      1. I’m not sure why shelter in place and Covid have given me a better grasp on moderation but this year we’ve managed to have Halloween candy in the house pretty much this whole month and I have been very good about it. And some of the candy is up there in terms of my favorites, Almond Joy minis and little Reese’s peanut butter cups.

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  3. We usually give out fistfuls of salted peanuts-in-the-shell. We don’t get many t or t’ers, but I’ll put on some plastic gloves and divide them into maybe 10 baggies (Wish I had cute ones like yours, VS), and put them in a plastic pumpkin with the sign “Self Serve – take ONE.”

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    1. BiR, if you were here in town I would bring you over some of the little bags. In order to get them either I had to buy 100 of them in a packet. They really weren’t very expensive but the fact that I bought 100 when I knew I only needed 30 seems a little silly right now. That being said – if any of the baboons in the Twin Cities want any little orange and white bags for tonight, let me know. I have time I can drive them over!!

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        2. Ah, bummer PJ. Wish I was closer to help. So it started yesterday and today you got nothing? Try just jiggling the battery cable; maybe the connection is dirty and corroded. Maybe it’s more than that.
          Why has the doornail been used as that example over the years? Door nails were always dead, right? Why not deader than a rock? Deader than a hammer. (and is a dead blow hammer still deader than your car battery?) What’s special about a “Door” nail and not a cleat nail?
          I know, someone will look that up for me.
          I’m writing about the ‘Seven Dimension of Judaisms; due by 11:00 tonight. I should be out cleaning the garden and doing this tonight. And yet here I am. Get this done and I can be lazier tonight.

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        3. Funny that you should ask, Ben. As I was writing it, I wondered where that expression came from, so looked it up. It’s a really old expression, William Shakespeare used it. Look it up.

          As for my car, I knew there was a problem of some sort, but I can’t get it in to the shop until Wednesday. Fortunately, the only place I’m scheduled to be, other than at our house, is tomorrow afternoon for my weekly visit with Philip. Husband will drive me, it’s only five minutes from here, so not a big deal. But I do appreciate the concern and suggestions for fixing it.

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        7. Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

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  4. Occasionally, when we weren’t going to be home at trick-or-treat time, we’ve just put out a bowl and let the kids sort it out for themselves. We’ll probably do that again. The fact that the bowl is usually not completely empty at the end suggests that everyone was considerate. If not, so what. We don’t want any candy left over. Last year the leftover candy sat in a drawer until we finally threw it out. I have a big bag of snickers and a bag of twix to dispose of.

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  5. I’m lucky my mom wasn’t fond of alcohol. She sure binged on M&M candies. She’d doze off watching TV, waking up to find she had emptied one of those really big bags of M&Ms, the size you buy when you are throwing a party. Like a binge drinker, she’d have no memory of eating the candy.

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  6. Today is kefse day. It has chilled in the garage over night. I am about ready to rice it for a second time, then add the flour, and get rolling and frying. Husband is the flipper. I expect to be pretty tired , since we are going to make chicken curry, with sides of eggplant curry and curried chickpeas after the lefse is done. I don’t think we will have any t and there, but if our gardening buddies from next door come over, they will get lefse.

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        4. First you rice the cooked, cooled potatoes. Then you mix in the cream, sugar, salt, and melted lard. Then you refrigerate it over night, then you rice it again, add flour, and roll and fry it.

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        2. The old Lefse/Lease change has just about driven me to rage at times. Clearly whomever developed autocorrect is not from Minnesota or Scandinavia, and they have missed a very important error. Bah. Humbug.

          How can someone like me, a Norwegian, but an anti lefse/lutefisk Norwegian vent properly with autocorrect in the mix?

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  7. I’ll bet many of you have the same experience of Halloween we use to have. The very first kids to come, the ones carried or accompanied by parents, are the cutest. Their costumes might not be much, for a kid that little isn’t really clued in on costumes. Then come bigger and better costumed kids. Then, maybe after two hours or so, bigger kids come, kids getting close to their teens. They are often mercenaries intent on getting a big haul of goodies, and some of them have a bit of attitude. I didn’t mind any of this, although the earlier kids were sure the most fun.

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    1. A few years ago, one of the older kids that came later in the evening was a Black kid who didn’t wear a costume. I asked him what he was dressed as. He pondered that for a moment and replied: “A free man.” I gave him an extra candy bar.

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    2. It’s exactly the same pattern that I always experience Steve. And my feeling about the older kids is it if I have candy left and they want to walk around with a pillow case, I don’t really care. I give out candy until it’s gone.

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  8. What cute little bags, vs. I’m repeatedly amazed at the amount of time and effort you put into thoughtful little gestures like that one.

    Halloween is a kind of hit and miss proposition at our house, even at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times. Husband is a Grinch whose attitude puts a damper on Halloween, as well as Christmas. Of course, he didn’t grow up with Halloween, so it’s not a long-standing tradition for him, but neither did I, and I’ve adjusted. The Christmas thing, I can neither explain nor understand.

    At Halloween he fuses over the cost of the candy bars, and generally sees the trick-or-treaters as a nuisance. Bernie, of course, doesn’t help matters with his incessant barking every time someone approached the front door. Between the two of them, it’s pretty hard to sustain any enthusiasm for the tradition. This year I’m ignoring it, just don’t have the surfeit of energy or spirit needed to squander on fighting that battle.

    Did everyone see my post late last night about the free downloads from Neal & Leandra?

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  10. we’ve become Halloween curmudgeons in the past several years. Mainly because the neighborhood kids are mostly grown up and gone. We started a tradition of going out to dinner on Halloween (early) and staying out until about 8:00. One year that single dinner morphed into a weekend trip down to Lincoln, Nebraska where I played a 5* golf course, my wife spent a fun day (for her) at the International Quilt Museum (I accompanied her on a second visit the next day), and we ate some darn good barbecue.

    We sure showed those little rapscallions and whippersnappers a thing or two, eh?

    Chris in Owatonna (we’re staying home tonight and don’t figure to have any T or T-ers ringing our doorbell . . . but we’re eating BBQ ribs! 🙂 (Store-bought, not real deal, but still tasty)

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  11. I just had a nice walk with Guinevere re and we passed a guy who is “Rube Goldberging Halloween”. His house is on a hill with about 20 steps up to it and when we went by he was attaching a black PVC pipe that had orange electrical tape stripes on it to the hand railing. I’m almost tempted to go by there tonight to see if gravity works and the candies make it all the way down the tube!!

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  12. Like VS, I have bags of treats ready to go. I happened to be in Joann a couple weeks ago and they had already discounted all the Halloween stuff quite a bit. Mine are black and white stripes. Will put them out on a little shelf for the kiddos to take. In a good year, like VS, we get 20 or 25 kids, sometimes as many as 30 – doubt I will get that many this year. That likely means there will be Snickers and M&Ms left for me. 🙂

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  13. We made today better by turning the clocks back as soon as we got up. It has seemed like a less hurried day, and now plenty of time to get the curry going.

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  14. Halloween blue moon. Has not happened since about 7 weeks before I was born. That seems improbable to me, but guess it is so.
    In an apartment building none have come for a few years. I bought no candy. Some people in the building put a bowl on the table in the lobby. My son lives In a brand new neighborhood in Idiocy Idaho. They are putting out a bowl on a table in the yard. He will watch to see that no one empties it.
    My son has fought his way through all the errors by clinic to have his kidney removed. Went in for pre-op yesterday. Infection is back in his navel. They have hit it hard with antibiotics. If not misty cleared by Monday, his surgery will be delayed. So he is sequestering as much as you can outdoors on the porch.

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        1. Join the club. I have gone in four times today and edited my voice recognition comments after I posted prematurely without checking

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  16. OT YouTube post. Two great interests in my life have been acoustic guitar music and fishing. I don’t expect others to share those interests, but today I’ll mention two YouTube channels that exemplify the way YouTube can entertain all sorts of folks. If your thing is crocheting or mountain biking, you might be able to enjoy YouTube sites about that.

    Let’s start with Ted Woodford, a luthier (a fancy word for a guy who repairs and/or builds stringed instruments like guitars). As he fixes guitars, Ted talks about what he is doing. I’ll never own or repair a guitar again, so it might seem odd that I love Ted’s channel. But I do, and he has a passionate following much larger than people who fix guitars.

    Ted is very intelligent. I enjoy hearing him talk, for he speaks with precision and humor. Much of the time he is showing how difficult it is to fix guitars and make a little profit doing so, but he isn’t complaining. Ted is a gifted workman working in an age where such people are not valued. His discussions about guitar repair ultimately come down to issues of what we value in this society. Ted fixes guitars that were never very good and aren’t profitable to fix. Why? Because he just likes guitars and hates our readiness to throw away things that could be saved with a bit of intelligent repair.

    My favorite fishing channel is NDYakAngler. The name means that this guy, Matt Nelson, lives in Fargo and fishes from a one-man kayak. He is careful to not mention where he fishes, for he lives near incredibly productive waters that get little angler traffic and Matt doesn’t want to spoil that, not because he is selfish but because he loves those waters. He is an excellent angler. He might catch more fish in an afternoon than some of his followers catch in a whole season.

    Matt represents something relatively new: the GoPro outdoorsman. A company called GoPro invented a high quality, durable and compact video camera that can be worn while hunting and fishing. These cameras make it possible to record hunting and fishing trips in real time. Sportsmen now can make a permanent record of their favorite activities.

    Matt has become popular for reasons I find sad. He loves fishing and shares the whole experience: the beauty of lakes and rivers, the birds singing in the distance and the excitement of catching big fish. But his narration is totally free of ego and hype. Some viewers call him the “Bob Ross of fishing.” Many fishing YouTube channels are deceptive, forced and pretentious. One viewer summed it up: “This guy’s gimmick is that he doesn’t have a gimmick.”

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    2. Not sure that I understand your reasoning here: “Matt has become popular for reasons I find sad.” What is it you find sad?

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      1. Thanks for asking, PJ. I did a poor job of saying what I meant to say. If you look at Matt’s videos (and I’ve seen maybe 30) the comments from viewers are intriguing. People love his videos. Over and over, they keep finding ways of saying how astonishing they find his videos to be. Why? Because everything is sweet and natural and true. It is good to hear that so many people can enjoy an unpretentious presentation, but those comments are a sad reflection on the countless other videos about fishing. People seem driven to adorn the natural beauty of fishing when it is as good as it sometimes can be. Matt’s gimmick is that he doesn’t have a gimmick. What a world we live in.

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