Halloween should be all about peanut butter kisses

To a household of people trying to lose weight, and with a little boy who doesn’t need to be “sugared up,” Halloween is a bit of a holiday from hell. While some may say the holiday – if it can be called that – is then successfully living up to its reputation and intended purpose, I’ll disagree, mainly because I belong to this family.


Don’t get me wrong. I love Halloween; in fact, I believe it’s the third best one, right behind Thanksgiving and Christmas. I love the decorations associated with Halloween, and the costumes people come up with for the occasion can be pants-splitting hilarious.

And the entire tradition of going from house to house dressed in a costume and asking people for candy is mind-boggling in a “can we really do that?” sort of way.

When my wife, Jenny, our 5-year-old son, Braden, and I hit the streets of Plover on Sunday for trick-or-treating, I assumed the candy haul would be about the same as when I was a kid – about half an ice cream pail full of assorted candy, half of which would be the peanut butter kisses in the black or orange wrappers. I often ate all the candy I collected the same night.

Trick-or-treating has evolved since I was a kid, because Braden didn’t collect one peanut butter kiss. Either they don’t make them anymore, the government declared them unfit for consumption (which wouldn’t be surprising, given their tendency to become harder than a rock if exposed to temperatures less than 50 degrees for more than half an hour), or my hometown of Wautoma is strangely unique in the fact peanut butter kisses are only the norm there, and not elsewhere.

In addition, the amount of candy Braden collected was literally 12 times the amount I collected. He filled up an entire canvas shopping bag in a little more than two hours, which may not seem like all that much until you discover exactly how much those bags can hold. At home, we emptied the candy contents of the bag into two giant salad bowls and came to the realization we have enough candy to last the entire family until well past Christmas.

And it’s all good stuff, like miniature candy bars, a few full-size candy bars, individually packaged licorice sticks and rice crispy treats, granola bars, packages of Milk Duds and M&Ms, and even some small bags of chips.

It was all so good that only the truly unusual items stood out to Braden – a package of silly bands, a green stick of licorice, a spider ring, a tube of play dough, and a skeleton decoration. Those were all the items he wanted first.

He wants the candy, too, but Jenny and I limit the amount of sugar we give him, as we’re not big fans of “Hyper Boy.” This means we do not give him any in the morning, and he gets a few items when he gets home in the evening, but only if he’s been a good boy. At this rate, we figure he could get through all the candy by next Halloween.

That’s only if Jenny and I weren’t helping him eat it. We generally keep this type of food out of the house, because if you don’t have it, you won’t eat it. But since we have it, both of us have dipped our paws in the bowls more than a few times. Somebody’s got to eat it, I guess.

I know a solution. More peanut butter kisses. All our problems will be resolved.