Last year, at my old house in Ames, I don't think I had more than 20 trick-or-treaters on Halloween. It was sort of a down year, but not too far off the average for the four Halloweens we lived there. It wasn't a neighborhood with a lot of kids, but it was fairly residential. Twenty seemed about right.
Now I live in a much more family-oriented neighborhood in Des Moines. So I knew that I would probably have more trick-or-treaters this year. I loaded up last week, figuring we could always just eat the leftover candy. "We've got plenty of candy over here," I bragged to my neighbors yesterday afternoon as we discussed football and chased my neighbor Joe's rambunctious cats out of my garage. "You can send them over here; we'll get it covered."
I figure I started the evening with 200 treats. Trick-or-treating began at 6, and I didn' t have a knock at the door until 6:15. We've got plenty of candy, I thought, kicking back in my chair with the Opinion pages of the Sunday Register. A few more kids started coming...okay, we'll go through a good chunk of it...and before I knew it I was listening to a nonstop barrage of jokes (a Des Moines tradition -- you must tell a joke to receive candy on "Beggar's Night") and watching the candy bowl drain down to the least desirable items. My husband, who was in the family room watching Dogma on Comedy Central while swearing in the general direction of a do-it-yourself project, was no help. He just watched me dart from the front door back to the kitchen, using every possible 10-second lull in the action to scan our cupboards for candy or candy-type food products. "Could I hand out marshmallows?" I asked him as he spilled rubber cement in the carpet. "How about granola bars? Do kids like granola bars?" I thought I had some gum in my purse.
Sadly, at 7:20 p.m., I threw in the towel and turned off the front-stoop light of surrender. The kids had eaten me, and my Kit-Kat bars, alive. I had no trick-or-treating game at all. I'd better start my next year's trick-or-treat candy savings fund now.
I did, however, enjoy seeing the costumes and hearing the jokes. My very first trick-or-treater was a three-foot-tall black boy dressed as Napoleon Dynamite, which I found hilarious. And by far the most popular joke of the year was: "Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? -- Because he didn't have the guts." I did not enjoy the snotty 10-year-old who chewed me out because "our steps were too steep" and caused her sister to fall and scrape her knee. All I could do was offer the sister a Band-Aid while her older sib proceeded to berate me. Gee, I hope I didn't act like that when I was 10.
Oh yeah, and I still want to know what a 2-year-old is going to do with Hot Tamales.
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