Remember Halloween?

If you were to walk into any store these days, you would probably think that the next holiday to be celebrated was Christmas. Contrary to retailer belief though, we actually have two holidays, including one pretty major one, between now and Christmas.

In just a few short weeks, we will celebrate the end of the harvest by stuffing our faces. This holiday is know as Hallowe’en or, if you’re not into traditional spellings, Halloween. Ironically, we will not be partaking of the fruits of said harvest but will be gorging ourselves on sugary confections originating in Hershey, Pennsylvania and McLean, Virginia (home of M&M’s).

On Saturday, our ward held their annual trunk or treat. This is a safe environment where neighborhood kids can run around a parking lot and get candy from people sitting in and around their vehicles. Normally, I try to encourage my kids to not take candy from people that are sitting in their car but for this, I made an exception. We have about 4.3 million kids living within our ward boundaries so, as you can probably imagine, there were a lot of kids running around in costumes.

Since I’m basically a single dad with Holly trying to finish nursing school, I took the kids over to the church by myself. They trick or treated, or trunk or treated if you will, for about half an hour. I was surprised that there were so many cars there to get candy from. By the time we left for home, all three kids had candy buckets that were nearly full. They were full of good stuff like Reese’s too. I honestly thought that everybody would be handing out miniature Tootsie Rolls but I was pleasantly wrong.

When we got home, I had the kids take off their costumes and change back into their normal clothes. Since I told them that they couldn’t have any of their candy until this was done, they were quick to comply. In fact, Emma started taking her costume off while we were still getting out of the van.

Within a few minutes, all three kids were digging into their buckets trying to decide which piece of candy they would eat first. It was at this point that I discovered that most of the chocolate was very soft and close to melting so I told the kids put it in the fridge to keep it from making more of a mess than it already had. Alex and Emma, both with chocolaty fingers, immediately saw the wisdom in my request and did this. I then saw Hannah’s empty bucket and assumed that she had done the same. I was wrong.

The other two kids said that Hannah had eaten all of her candy but since we’d only been home for about ten minutes, I didn’t think that they knew what they were talking about. She had a lot of candy. There was no way that she had eaten it all in such a short amount of time. About 20 minutes later, I was mowing the lawn and Emma came out to tell me that Hannah had thrown up. Apparently she had tried to fit one more Jolly Rancher in but her little stomach was too full and decided to rebel. It was disgusting but there were some definate benefits to her binging and then purging her candy as she did. First, she didn’t absorb all of the calories that she had eaten. Second, she wasn’t on a sugar high all day. In fact, she went to bed earlier than either of the other two kids. Something tells me though that we’ll be seeing a repeat performance on October 31 and possibly November 1.