Halloween: How Much Candy Is Too Much?

By Bob Wire, 9-21-09

It’s coming. The leaves are starting to color and drop off the trees, there’s a chill in the air that means business, and I’m starting to wear underwear again. Autumn is here, and that means one thing: Halloween is on the horizon.

Speaker and Rusty are looking at costume catalogs, stores have been displaying mountains of candy since Labor Day, and the party invitations have already started arriving in the mail (presumably to give you plenty of time to build that Michael Jackson zombie costume). But the impending holiday (is it a holiday, really? Are the banks closed?) brings the vague feelings of uneasiness and guilt that are never far from any parent’s consciousness.

It’s the candy largesse that bothers me. I’ve been working on my annual anti-sugar tirade, but it occurs to me now that I’m picking unfairly on Halloween. If ever there was a holiday that belongs to the kids, this is it. It’s the tremendous glut of sweets that feeds my worry. My kids will be ingesting an amount of sugar over the course of a weekend to make enough cakes to build a life-sized replica of the Eiffel Tower. And that includes frosting, Monsieur.

But guess what: my kids—and probably most kids—are shoveling the sweet stuff into their yaps at frightening levels already. Every day. I watched Rusty fix a bowl of cereal one morning, and I asked him, “Rusty, why’d you put sugar on your Frosted Flakes?”

He looked up from the comics, absently stirring more Hershey’s syrup into his glass of chocolate milk, and shrugged. “That’s just the way I roll.”

I try to keep fresh fruit in the house, and there are always plenty of crackers, pretzels, cheese, baby carrots, and other easy, healthy snacks. But unless I’m standing guard in front of the kitchen cabinets with a can of pepper spray, the kids will seek out candy. They will climb up onto the counter, and reach way back into the top cupboard and locate a two-year-old bag of Swedish fish that had been hiding behind a box of CrapLoad Bran Flakes and two bear traps. A new pack of Oreos will be stripped bare like a hapless cow that has fallen into the Amazon, before I finish putting the groceries away. But they’ll always leave one cookie. What the hell is that about?

I know what you’re thinking: “Gee, Bob, why don’t you institute some wholesale changes in your family’s diet?” I can only say that it’s too late. But thanks for asking. When I unwrapped that first mini-Tootsie Roll for Rusty and Speaker the day I saw their first tooth, their fates were sealed. It may as well have been a skin-pop of heroin. To this day they will stop talking mid-sentence and their pupils will dilate if we walk past a snack vending machine. Those big glass-front jobs that are stuffed with rows of candy and chips are like a giant looking glass into Wonderland. The kids will lean against the glass, palms and noses pressed up against the surface, drooling over cherry Nibs, greasy fudge brownies and Tropical Skittles. The only trance that’s harder to break is SpongeBob Stupor.

I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth myself until I became a father. Soon, I was finding our cupboards and refrigerator and freezer jammed with all manner of cookies, candy, ice cream and pastries. I was mystified, even though I was usually the one who bought it.

Don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against the kids having a bowl of ice cream for dessert, or for a bedtime snack. But does it always have to be drenched in chocolate syrup and garnished with sprinkles and malted milk balls? The kids’ young metabolisms burn the stuff off, but I’m afraid that by the time they hit puberty they’ll be fat and twitchy, with rotten teeth crumbling inside their braces and the attention span of a fruit fly.

And the addiction really bothers me. The kids are like that farmer/alien in Men In Black: “Give me sugar! In wa-ter! More! More!” They find their sugar anywhere they can, like a hardcore alcoholic slugging down aftershave and Sterno. If we have rice for dinner, Speaker will invariably drown it in sweet & sour sauce. I checked the label the other night, and sure enough, the first ingredient on the list is corn syrup. The second ingredient? More corn syrup. Just as I suspected—it’s all Sweet, no Sour. No wonder we go through a bottle a week.

So when they come home from trick or treating this year, I’ll let them have their ritual. They’ll dump their loot onto the living room floor, and engage in a session of candy trading that will make the New York Stock Exchange look like a game of jacks. But when they’re asleep, I’ll cull their stash by about two-thirds, and throw out the excess. Except for the chocolate. I’ll keep that for, um, emergencies.

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