This Halloween continued the trend of child-led costume assembly that began last year. I’m all in favor because it appeals to my general laziness and to my “bah, humbug” attitude about holidays, especially holidays that don’t involve roast turkey.
So, my children took the reins with decorating and costume assembly while I served as a consultant and occasional assistant. There’s a lot less swearing this way.
My daughter used a white bedsheet to create a chiton (I helped with safety pins) and I put her hair in a bun, and she became a woman from Ancient Greece. She looked so tall and confident and womanish it made my heart hurt to look at her.
My son donned a black sweatshirt, black sweatpants, my red scarf as a sash, and two coffee filters around his neck as a 17th-century collar to become Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose army helped out Frederick II and the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. For more information about Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Thirty Years’ War, visit your local library or Wikipedia.
They hit the very quiet streets and came back with a decent haul, probably because our neighbors were, like us, desperate to get rid of their candy on a strangely kid-light Halloween.
As is the tradition here on Imperfect Happiness, here are the candy pies:
To compare this year’s variety to years past, visit 2013, 2015, and 2016′s Halloween Pie posts (I must not have posted the pie charts for 2014).
They still collected more candy than necessary (how much candy is necessary, anyway?), but both children’s totals took a hit this year compared to years past. My son is almost back to 2013 levels and my daughter reached a five-year low:
If this trend continues, I might have to start buying Easter candy. (No more cries of “Hooray! The Easter Bunny left a pumpkin-shaped peanut butter cup!”)
I thought for a while that this year was going to be the first that my kids opted out of trick-or-treating, but they got excited at the last minute (literally at about 2:00pm when I asked if they wanted to buy some pumpkins on the way home from homeschool co-op). We’re apparently still in the game for now. I admit, even as a Halloween Humbug, I will be a little sad to see the end of this particular era.
Another Halloween documented and stashed away. I hope it was a great one for you, however you chose to celebrate (or not).
Imperfect Happiness 
Did you factor the night of the week into your analysis of the downward trend for candy haul? Tuesday evenings should not be able to compare to weekend nights. And considering your son’s reaction to the Easter egg hunt I lead which included no candy, I think there is something to your intuitive comment about buying candy for Easter.
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I hadn’t factored in the day of the week. It seems like that would have a greater effect on how much candy we had left than how much candy the children collected. I suspect that my children’s haul is related more to interest (for this year) and hand size (in years past). But it’s a pretty small sample size. I’d do better to collect data from all of our neighbors, and then compare that to data from other neighborhoods. Rather more data collection than I’m interested in (and people would probably think I was weird for asking anyway).
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