Keep Your Candy Corn to Yourself, Thanks
As my colleague Melissa Dowling notes, marketers are already bombarding us with Christmas catalogs.
But I can’t deal with that just yet. As the mom of two small children, right now I’m knee deep in Halloween spookery.
I’m at war with the squirrels, who are eating the three pumpkins on my porch. (See the stem they gnawed up just this morning?) Last night, I undertook my annual sewing project, in which I sloppily hemmed two Transformers costumes. Plus, I’m tasked with figuring out a hastily made costume for myself. (I’ll likely be a cat or a pirate—I wanted to be Amy Winehouse, but I think that might be too scary.)
And then there’s deciding on what candy to buy to give out. We have to shell out for pounds of the stuff—lots of kids are in our neighborhood, and my hubby’s office has a trick-or-treat afternoon as well for the little nippers.
What do you buy and give out? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a short piece on what is the worst thing folks ever received on their Oct. 31 jaunts. Personally, I’m anti candy corn. It’s one of those sweets that I just can’t see the point of, even though it does look cute.
I roamed the aisles of Target earlier today, trying to figure out what to buy. My five year old didn’t understand why we couldn’t offer kids a bowl of unwrapped M&Ms (ah, to live in that innocent a world).
I went back and forth between bags of Snickers and Tootsie Pops, trying to figure out what was the best value. Can’t they standardize the sizes of candy bags or something? Or how about packaging that says “if you get X number of trick-or-treaters, buy X bags of this candy.”
So, how about it, candy marketers. Can you take pity on a harried mom and make your sweets a little easier to sort out?
Then again, never mind. If I ever figured out the right amount of candy to buy, we wouldn’t have a basket of leftovers on Nov. 1. And that’s a world I just wouldn’t want to live in.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:31 am
My pumpkins are being eaten too! Except it’s raccoons, of all critters, not squirrels. And they’re eating them at night.
Darn. now I have to go out and buy two new pumpkins for my kids. And carve them again.
Oh, and the worst thing my kids ever got for Trick or Treat? Chicken wings. Yup, that’s right, fried chicken wings in a wax bag. Never figured out who gave them to us. Weird …