Last week was Halloween. See where I'm going with this?
My son is 12. He likes candy. This year, he went out with some kids from the neighborhood, with no parent involvement. He left before 6, we told him to be in touch by 9. We're cool, right?
He dressed up as Odell Beckham, complete with broken ankle and dislocated finger. It was a "low effort" costume - he already had the jersey (cuz, you know, Odell Beckham is awesome), and then we wrapped his ankle with athletic tape and put a splint on his finger. If you don't like to look at bodies breaking, don't watch this or look at this. He also had a king-size pillowcase, because he heard that last year, these kids got five pounds of candy and they had to stop off at home in the middle to make more room in their sacks.
The kids he went out with are neighborhood veterans. They allegedly had a map and a plan, because some houses give out the big stuff early in the evening before they run out, and others give out big handfuls later, when they're ready to turn off the lights and stop answering the door. And, of course, some houses are just plain better than others, so you have to make sure you have them on your list.
My wife tried to entice them to come by our house (they started at another kid's house, several blocks away) by buying a few full size candy bars, just for them. Our neighbors came over, so we could hang out and join forces. As it turns out, the hanging out was way more important than the joining of forces, because our neighborhood is not a hotbed of trick-or-treat activity. When I was a kid, my neighborhood was a zoo - the kind of zoo that has no cages and is full of zombies and princesses and batmen. Pretty much everybody my age has the same story. But these days, at least in Eugene, there are a few good neighborhoods and a lot of bad neighborhoods. And we live in one of the bad ones, apparently. I know this because the foot traffic was, shall we say, limited.
At around 7, the doorbell rang for the first time. It was a cow, a teletubby, and a half-broken Odell Beckham (they made it!). They were red-faced and sweating - clearly they had been running and accumulating candy as fast as possible. They had started with a larger pack of kids, but quickly separated into two groups - one that was out trick-or-treating and having a good time, and another that was pretty squarely in the quantity-isn't-everything-it's-the-only-thing camp. My wife offered them each a full-size candy bar, which was obviously insulting to them, because they wanted to know HOW MANY full size candy bars they could each have. We let them each have one (we're cool, but not that cool).
About a half hour later, the doorbell rang again. It was a unicorn, an I-don't-remember, and I-think-maybe-a-cat-but-really-I-don't-remember - part of the larger group that our son and his band of candy maniacs had ditched not too long ago. And soon after that, a lone Chinese to-go container with a fortune cookie on top was our last visitor of the night (Why do I remember that costume but not the others? Cuz it was awesome).
Seven kids, three rings of the doorbell. That's Halloween in my neighborhood. If our son hadn't started with that big group and spread the word about our full-size bars, the entire evening would have been just the to-go container kid, all by himself. In that alternate reality, I can just imagine that solo trick-or-treater: best house ever - there are 18 full size chocolate bars and a bowl full of other candy, and lucky me, I'm a to-go container!
At 8:30 or so, the door opened and in walked our son with his king-sized candy sack. Still breathless, red-faced, and sweating. He weighed his candy (yes, really). 14 pounds (yes, really). 14 pounds, including one tangerine, one packet of hot chocolate powder, and one pencil (really? people still give out pencils on Halloween?). Apparently, we weren't the only ones giving out full size candy bars. He counted them, but I forgot the number. It was a lot.
We let him eat the tangerine, cuz fuck those rumors that scare kids away from fruit. We didn't let him eat the pencil. And, as usual, we had him take out all of the candy with hydrogenated fat in it. That's our line on Halloween. Hydrogenated fat? Out. No hydrogenated fat? In. So he took out 5 pounds of the bad stuff. Luckily, there were some top tier candy bars in the good pile: Twix, 100 Grand, Kit Kat. There were, however, some pretty good specimens in the bad pile, most importantly Snickers. The next day, I was downstairs and he started yelling to me, "Dad! Dad! Snickers are ok! Snickers are ok! Dad! Snickers are ok! Look at the ingredients!" Again, he's breathless, red-faced, hurrying to deliver the news to me. I knew he was wrong, and I was sad about it. I like Snickers as much as the next guy. I looked it up online - hydrogenated fat. I looked at the wrapper - a bunch of blurry lines. I put on my old-man glasses and tried again - no hydrogenated fat. What the...!? So I decided to give Snickers the benefit of the doubt - we all know how unreliable the internet is, but wrappers don't lie. We ate a bunch of Snickers. What's the worst that could happen?
So the initial 14 pound haul, minus the 5 pounds of hydrogenated poison, plus the Snickers Miracle, add in the candy that we had left over at the house that our son took and put in his pile, carry the one, and...
I don't know how this ends. But I do know that 14 pounds of candy is too much.