I remember my friends and I planning our routes and strategies for Halloween night when I was a kid for many days before the cherished event.
My parents never kept much junk food in the house, so Halloween allowed me the opportunity to stock up on potato chips, bars, and candy for a long time, and my clique of friends and I took Halloween very seriously.
After years of trial and error, we learned where the best houses in our neighbourhood were to get the most valued treats, like full-sized chocolate bars and big bags of cotton candy, and we would head there first as we began our journey from street to street to make sure other aggressive trick-or-treaters didn’t get to these favourite destinations ahead of us and clean these places out.
Homes that were not on our list were the ones that handed out apples (candy apples were acceptable however) and other healthy options.
We always felt cheated out of our time and effort when homeowners would slip apples, bananas, cheese-and-cracker packages and other such mundane foods that would just take up space in our bags that would be better used for the more sugar and salt-packed items that we craved so much in those days.
We figured that those homeowners didn’t like kids, and this was to ensure that they didn’t return again in subsequent years.
If that was their strategy, it certainly worked with us.
There was only a few hours before the magical annual evening ended, and we were determined to gather as much loot as we could in that time.
We had no patience for healthy alternatives while other homes were much more productive for what we were looking for.
As our bags filled, we would dump the contents in safe places along our route, which was typically in each others’ houses, and then start out again to try and fill our bags as many times as we could before people started running out of supplies or it got too late to be ringing doorbells.
It was also not wise to be carrying too much junk food at any given time on Halloween night as you would set yourself up as a target for the older and bigger kids who felt that trick-or-treating was beneath them, but roaming the neighbourhood stealing the loot from guys like us was perfectly acceptable.
So our loot dumps were pretty frequent during the evening.
When it was all over, I would bring in all of my loot through my bedroom window to avoid my older (and bigger) six siblings seeing just how much I had.
They could be as bad, or worse, than the candy-stealing bullies that we worked hard to avoid all night and would often take whatever, and how much, they wanted with one hand while holding me at arms length with the other hand while I swung my fists uselessly in the air.
Then, safely in my bedroom with the door locked, I would pour all the proceeds from a busy night onto my floor and wade through it much like Scrooge McDuck would swim through his huge vault of coins in those old Disney comics that were popular when I was young.
I would sit there for hours gorging myself on sugar and salt until I literally got sick, pretty much like every other youngster that took part in the yearly tradition.
Then I would hide what was left, which was still pretty substantial, in areas in my bedroom and throughout the house where I thought my brothers and sisters wouldn’t look for it.
I usually had enough junk food stashed away to last me several months.
It was one of my favourite times of year when I was young, and it even rivalled Christmas for me.
I now live on a busy four-lane roadway, so I don’t see a lot of trick-or-treaters as they generally stay to the quiet and safer streets in my neighbourhood.
But I always buy a big box of bags of potato chips and/or a big pile of chocolate candy bars each year just in case some kids should show up on my doorstep.
But in the end, I usually end up sitting in my living room eating most of it myself.
Some things never change, no matter how old you get.
