Halloween

So Halloween is a few weeks away. You know what that means…CANDY!!! It also means that people are thinking of a costume to wear. Not just kids, but adults as well. Now I go to a church that does not believe in celebrating Halloween, they don’t want to promote ghost, goblins, and witches. But they have a fall carnival so the kids can still get their yearly sugar high and advance tooth decay. I don’t totally agree with this, I see no problem letting your kids pretend to be something else and go begging door to door for people to give them something. It’s good training in case their future is in sales. Also as long as you explain that the creatures of the night are not good and not real, what’s the problem if they dress up like their favorite cartoon character or super hero, I love wearing a cape when I was a kid. It would be fun to wear one today, but that’s a different story.

What I don’t understand is the amount of money some parents put into their kids costumes. They are only going to wear it maybe for a few days out of the whole year for a few hours. Where’s the imagination in that? My mom would help us make our own costume or sew something together. She did once buy part of a costume. Remember the old plastic Halloween masks. The ones that were cheap plastic, the front were molded into the characters face, the back was just a little stretch string that went around the head. If you pulled too hard to would either snap or rip the mask. It had two pin size holes to barely help breathing, who knows what type of plastic fumes we were inhaling. It had two other holes that allowed you to see, but it gave you total tunnel vision. You could see a few feet in front of you, but forget about seeing the on coming car approaching from the left or right of you. So one year my mother got me one of these mask, the Lone Ranger. I was excited, and I already had the guns and a plastic sheriff badge. She made the rest of the costume from some old clothes. I was happy, and I still got the goods that night as well. The next year mom used the same mask; no I was not the Lone Ranger again. That is a Halloween fashion crime to be the same thing twice in a row. We took a magic marker, colored the white hat black, drew a little mustache, and with the already black mask that was there. Viola, you get Zorro. Add one sword made of newspaper and aluminum foil, dress in black. You get one happy kid chasing the cat around the house.

Why put in a lot of work and money for one night. The kids just want to run around and get candy. Candy that has gotten smaller over the years, I remember getting the big chocolate bars and hand full of candy. Now they have this bite size and mini bars crap, which people pass out just one of, whatever. If you grew up on a single dead end street like I did, you knew which neighbor passed out the good stuff. The guy across the street would pass out big Clark bars, and I could always count on the older people at the end of the street to give out handfuls of fire balls. Then you always have the house that gives out apples or a single stick of gum. Are you kidding me! Then there is the all time traditional candy….candy corn. You either love it or hate it. I love the stuff. You know families buy this stuff in bulk and it keeps for years and years. By the way just because it has corn in the name does not make it a vegetable. I never understood why they called it candy corn, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

Candy corn is a confection popular in the United States and Canada, particularly in autumn around Halloween.
Candy corn was created in the
1880s by George Renninger of the Wunderlee
Candy Company, the three colors
of the candy mimic the appearance of
kernels of corn. Each piece is
approximately the size of a whole kernel from a ripe or dried ear. Candy corn is
made primarily from sugar, corn syrup, artificial
coloring and binders.
A serving size of 22 pieces contains 140 calories and no fat.

I bet there is some old woman out there that drags out this big jar of candy corn every year for Halloween, it may be some of the original stuff. I bet a 130 year old piece of candy corn would still taste the same as a piece right out of the bag. Bonus, it’s fat free. I won’t go into that parts of the ingredients are binders, after eating a lot of it that speaks for it self.