It’s almost become common knowledge fact, that Halloween is all about acquiring as much candy as you can possibly hold before returning home.  Every year I see posts from other parents about places to go to dispose of all the excess sweets, as if suddenly you household has been inundated with hundreds of pounds of sugary confections that simply must be done away with at all costs.  Parents inspect the candy, checking to be sure the wrappers are intact, tossing out any of those forbidden home-made delicacies that, oddly enough might even be less harmful than the overprocessed sugary death that comes in the mass-marketed 2lb bags found in every grocery store and mini-mart.

But this year, I’m feeling a bit over-hyped on this whole process.  Looking over mine and the children of my friends, I really feel like the insanity surrounding the sugar is overblown, like we’ve been caught up in another mass idea that caught on somehow without any real backing other than the overimaginitive processes of the well-meaning adults out there.  There are dentists out there, bless them, who are taking up collections of “extra” candy to send to our troops overseas, there are websites ranting about households in a down economy spending $20 on candy to hand out to trick or treaters.

Wait.  $20??

Just so we’re clear.  Your average bag of candy, say one of the 2lb bags of Snickers, costs around $5 and contains roughly 40 “fun size” candy bars, right?  You can even do better than that if you look around a bit or go with one of the “fun mix” bags.  After 2 hours of trick or treating this year, my kids came home with roughly 25 pieces of candy each.  You heard me.  25 pieces.  Not POUNDS of candy.  In fact, if I put all 3 bags of candy together and weigh them, I’m looking at less than 3lbs all told.  So if the kids are bringing home 3 lbs of candy between them, and I’ve gone out and bought 20$ worth of candy (assuming $20 buys me four 2lb bags) to hand out to trick or treaters (which in my neighborhood are few and far between, by the way) guess what.

All that extra candy is probably not from your kids bringing it home.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, my situation is probably a little bit different.  I have about 5 trick or treaters come by my house in a good year (and I live in suburbia).  But to me, as a card-carrying participant of All Hallows Eve, theres nothing more soul withering than *not* having anything to hand out when the doorbell rings.  So I buy a full-sized bag of candy.  Basically, I’m *overbuying*, just in case, right?

So if you live someplace where there are a *lot* of trick-or-treaters, say you get a hundred on a good year, theres a good chance you’re going to overbuy in much the same fashion.  So that candy, those *pounds* of candy is just as likely to be from your guilt-riddled spending spree as it is from your kids being extra-industrious.

So, here in the aftermath, it just doesn’t seem fair to get on our kids cases about too much candy.  To hear people going on and on about obesity and health risks and bad teeth and oh how dare you let your kids collect candy when they could be collecting money for the homeless or handing out little bags of raisins or carrots instead.  The kids are getting targeted, but it’s we parents who really should be taking the blame.