Bagging the Candy!

I recently was watching one of my favorite Halloween shows, The Halloween Tree, with my grown daughter (and later with her boyfriend's help) as we were bagging the Halloween candy. (500 bags!!) Each year you see, I get ziplock bags and a lot of candy and I bag the candy into equal portions so that each kid who comes to my house, trick or treating on Halloween night, will get the same amount of candy. Also, since I am bagging it all, I know exactly how many bags I have and therefore, when Halloween is over, I just count the bags that are left and I will know exactly how many kids came by on Halloween night. This helps me to prepare for the next year. Last year, I had 343 kids come thru the Haunted Cave! They came from as far as Euless and downtown Fort Worth! Simply amazing! From Euless it is over 20 miles away! They had heard about my place and came up! I was so touched. But I refuse to ever run out of candy and so I am always prepared!

Here is just some of the candy about ready to be bagged:

I have added a Halloween sticker and a jumping spider to each ziplock bag as well. Usually it's a spider ring or some kind of little trinket.

I also do put together gift bags (100) of extra items and I have stuffed animals and such for the little kids who can't eat candy so much. I collect the stuffed animals usually after Halloween is over or from garage sales or some that I won in arcade machines or on the boardwalk at Seaside, NJ. The gift bags are limited and normally I have them outside for kids to take but they swarmed last year hahahaa so I will be keeping them with me to hand out instead. I also give away seek and find pc games I've played once or old movies or Halloween music cds. Straws, puzzles, pencils, stickers, tattoos, bubbles, mini notebooks...are just some of the items in the gift bags.

We also have small water pod bottles to hand out and glow bracelets for the first 100 kids. I am fixing up the plastic container I had bought for a party to hold sodas and thought it would be good to use it again for Halloween for the water. It was red, but faded to pink in the sun! DOH! So I am in the middle of spray painting it and will blog a post of how I did it to make it look like flames coming up as a cauldron! :) This is the water so far:

There will be cupcakes, cookies and some extra candy as well possibly, depending on how hot Halloween ends up being. I'll take pics as it gets closer to Halloween as I make them.

Halloween is always a huge to-do for me. While checking out this year at a grocery store, a cashier told me it was too dangerous for her to hand out candy at night, so she turns her lights out that night. She just shook her head at me to see me having so much candy and the bagger men said the way to cure having to buy so much candy was to turn the lights out. DOH!
I told them, no, not likely I will do that as my garage becomes a haunted cave! :)

I found this so sad. I feel lucky in that my neighborhood is safe and we do not have any problems on Halloween night. I can't ever see me turning my lights out and not having some type of setup for the kids.

Why do I do this? some might ask....

I will tell you...

It is for many reasons. First, to see the kids' faces when they come in their costumes and watch them face their fears in order to get candy. And this one night out of the whole year, they get to dress up and be whoever they want to be. They can be their hero, Thor, Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or a fairytale princess, butterfly or any cartoon character they wish! They can be fairies, mermaids, wizards, witches, mummies, werewolves, vampires....anything their own creativity and minds can think up!

I am also there until the very end, around 9:30 or 10 pm even to be sure all the kids who are going to come have come. I remember a couple years ago when a kid got out late and he was so sad that everyone else had turned their lights out long ago and they had run out of candy and his bag was so empty. I felt so bad for him. So I took his bag and filled it with a bunch of candy that I had left over and I gave him two fistfuls of the giant pixie stix too and he ran down the street full of glee and yelled back over his shoulder, "Never stop doing Halloooooweeeeeennnnnn!!!!"
Hahhahaa! I loved it! That just made my night to have been able to put a smile on his face like that.

No other holiday am I able to do something like that. My turn to give back just as the many parents and adults had given candy out when I was a kid and to my own two kids, now it is my turn to give back to the kids of today.

Halloween for me is not about evil or sinful things or anything negative at all. It is a time for the kids to be who they want to be. Get together with friends and laugh and talk and see all the crazy and scary setups, go to local haunts, and see how giving people really can be.

And now, lately, I have begun to do what I used to do as room mom for my kids when I brought in goodies for the kids and had holiday parties, teach. I used to teach the origins of the holidays, dispelling fears. For Halloween, I helped kids to not be afraid of ghosts, for those who came along during Halloween, when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest, that those ancestors are their own and would they be afraid of their grandmother? No. So I have included in our video projections, some history of Halloween and I will be continuing that each year, including more history of the different countries and their beliefs and holiday celebrations, making Halloween a truly fun time for the kids and educational at the same time, and even more so, giving them the memories to carry with them for a lifetime! :)

Do you know, I have a haunted cave where kids come thru to get their candy and many, when they see the wonder of the black lit cave as parts of their costumes light up and glow from it, they come thru again and again and are so honest when I went to give them candy, they tell me, "No thank you, you already gave me candy, I just wanted to come thru again!" :)
You have to like kids who are that damn honest. You really do.

So yea, so long as I have at least one kid to come knock on my door, I will never turn out my lights and I will 'never stop doing Halloween! :)