The downside of trick-or-treating here is that it’s a very small group, we know every family. The upside is that homemade treats are just fine, because we know every family.
When I was a kid (mid 80s) somebody put a homemade popcorn ball in my trick-or-treat bucket. We’d been warned not to eat homemade things at school, so I refused… my dad tried to convince me to eat it, then ate it himself while I watched, ill with dread that my daddy would be dead in the morning.
I think it’d be cruel to hand out homemade stuff, based on that experience.
I’m so glad I was a kid in the '50s. Four shopping bags full of candy, money, and all sorts of home-made goodies.
I was a kid in the 60s and we used to go around several city blocks. Tons of candy, apples and home made stuff.
My mother used to make doughnuts which were very popular.
When I was trick-or-treating in the early 80s, I would sometimes get a homemade item or a piece of fruit. I’d just eat it, poison and razor blades be damned.
Nowadays, I’d expect such stuff to get thrown out, but I’d be surprised if anyone “freaked out”.
I’d be afraid they might call me Christian, for not trying to stuff sugar and gluten down all the little kids’ throats.
God forbid someone make Halloween a little less of a useless holiday!
My neighbors wouldn’t be freaked. I like to bake, and everyone on this floor knows it; probably everyone on the adjacent floors as well. Anybody who lives in the building and brings a kid to my door will likely be expecting something I made from scratch, or nothing at all.
I still remember the weirdest “treat” I got as a kid, back in the 60s, on one Halloween. Popcorn. No, not a caramel ball or something like that, but a handful of loose popcorn dumped into our bags.
I wouldn’t be freaked out. But it would go right into the garbage.
The number of kids confirmed to have been poisoned by Halloween candy handed out by strangers is zero.
What if you knew the person giving out the candy, cookies, or whatnot?
I live in an apartment and don’t expect many trick-or-treaters who don’t live in the building; if there are any, they’ll be friends of residents. As I wrote upthread I like to bake and have been asked for freebies by my neighbors on many occasions. I expect I’m a known quantity.
It was. Nobody EVER did that. Not a single confirmed case. But everybody “knew” about some kid the next town over who ate a razor blade and died, or their cousin’s kid’s friend’s friend, or the mailman’s aunt’s hairstylist’s next door neighbor’s former college roommate’s kid, or…
Poisoned treats are the modern day version of ghosts and goblins. They never existed, but people still believe and are terrified of them. Sorting your kid’s candy and throwing away certain kinds of treats is the modern day version of prayer and crucifixes; if you do the ritual correctly, your family will be kept safe.
It would just be a total waste of time these days so I’d never attempt it. Quite honestly I wouldn’t expect anyone to eat it. I know I wouldn’t eat anything homemade from someone I didn’t know as I want to know what the kitchen it came out of was like.
I think you ought to use your real name. 
My mom once made us throw out factory-sealed candy when it came from a certain neighbor. It was Good-N-Plentys anyway.
Early in my trick-or-treating career it was always suggested that parents instruct their kids not to eat trats that weren’t factory wrapped. We rarely got any homemade treats. An occasional brownie in a baggie that got too mangled to eat bouncing around with the tiny Milk Dud boxes.
I might be remembering it all wrong but I feel like the year that Tylenol was tampered with and recalled (which google tells me was 1982) it turned into a full blown scare with Dan Rather looking into the camera sternly and admonishing parents to be extra vigilant. If they’ll poison the medicine they’ll poison the candy!
Since my son’s school doesn’t allow homemade treats at their BAKE SALES I wouldn’t expect a kid in this community to be allowed to eat a cookie I made, regardless of how clearly I identified it and myself. Plus I’d have to label that it includes gluten and was made in a kitchen where I frequently cook with peanuts. Suddenly the idea is a whole lot less festive.
If they were someone I know we’ll enough that I would eat at their house? Sure but that is a very small number. I would suspect that a stranger doing it was deluded if they thought their efforts wouldn’t be wasted.
Yeah, because everybody knows it’s damn near impossible to push a needle into a Three Musketeers bar.
Anybody else who chimes in to say they’d throw away home made snacks needs to explain how a candy bar is any safer just because it has an extremely thin layer of plastic surrounding it.
Or things like tootsie rolls, which aren’t really sealed at all. I’m certain you could tamper with them and then re-twist them right up. Except that no one has ever done that in the history of the world.
Halloween is the best night. It is huge in our neighborhood. I have to plan for 200-300 trick or treaters. It seems like Halloween is the offical beginning of sitting outside and enjoying the weather and talking to neighbors. I love it.
I don’t know anyone here to give away homemade things, there’s just too many kids. And I’ve watched way too many episodes of Hoarders now and get squicked about about eating most any thing where I don’t know the people personally.
Consider that candy bar was made in a regulated, sterilized factory, under sanitary conditions, with monitored ingredients, with a million others that day. The factory’s interests are to make a safe food product, or risk going out of business.
The little old lady down the street - no one knows how clean her kitchen is, or what ingredients she used, or if she washed her hands, etc…
I know you are referring to “tampered” food items, and I agree the hysteria about that is overblown. There are other, better reasons not to accept, or give out, home-made treats to/from people you do not know that well.