Do you love Halloween? Hate it? Feel completely bemused by it?
I fall in that last camp. My kids play dress up year round. Perhaps if I were more of a stickler for appropriate wear when we go out, costumes would be more fun on Halloween, but I see nothing wrong with going grocery shopping in a tutu and carrying a wand.
While I do appreciate the fun of the entire community getting in on trick or treating, Halloween costumes aren’t really that big of a deal for us. In fact, my 7-year-olds, M and J only wore this year’s brand-new costumes once, the day the picture above was taken. They wore them to dance class and the Halloween event at school. J then decided to be a pirate and M a cheerleader to a friend’s Halloween party. Tonight, M will be going trick-or-treating as a cowgirl and J as a princess who is not Sofia the First. The last four costumes were all pieced together independently by the children from their own closet.
I’m grateful that the girls used their new costumes as a financial exercise. They somehow got it in their heads that they needed to pay for their own costumes this year. I swear, I never told them that. They saved up their allowance and comparison shopped until they had enough for the outfits they wanted. At checkout, I told them I’d pay 50% of the cost, plus the sales tax.
My question for you is this:
What do you do with all the candy the kids bring home?
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The Great Pumpkin comes to our house! The kids get to keep about 10 pieces of candy, and they leave the rest out for The Great Pumpkin. Sometimes he comes Halloween night, but sometimes he comes a day or two later. He leaves them a toy in place of their candy. Last year he sent their five pounds if candy to the troops in Afghanistan! And we got a return thank you letter. My kids are trying to decide if they want the GP to come this year, but I’m encouraging it, because I barely let them eat candy as it is! Lol.
That’s BRILLIANT! Did you send the candy to a particular soldier or go through an organization?
Last year a friend’s brother was serving over there, do we sent it to him to share. I know one of the dentists in Gtown usually collects candy and pays $1/pound up to 5 pounds, then they send it to troops.
We just don’t go trick-or-treating. 😉 At 4 1/2, my girls still think that Halloween is an opportunity to share treats with our neighbors. We only go to 8 or 10 houses…people we know well…and we bake cookies (or something) to take when we go. We get a few pieces of candy, and then we’ll actually decline any more, saying we just wanted to wish them Happy Halloween.
Although my girls see other kids in the neighborhood doing the tradition trick-or-treating, they just chalk that up (I guess) to something we say quite often…that “different people have different rules, and that’s OK”.
I let my girls have a piece or two of candy, and then the rest “goes to school with Daddy” — which usually means that Mommy eats it. HA!
Once they’re in elementary school, it’s much harder to avoid trick-or-treating. Some schools even have trick-or-treating through the classrooms during school hours! Our El Paso school did; you may recall how much I hated the school’s relationship with sugar.
They eat it!
All at once? I had to tell my 7-year-olds that I refused to help them carry their candy. If it was too heavy, they could stop adding to their stash.