Thought it was just a rumor, eh? Well, allow me to set you straight. I did indeed give away full-size 3 Musketeers bars to lucky Trick-or-Treaters on Halloween. By my count, I gave away 78 of them at a cost of roughly $40 (3 boxes of 36 for about $53 from Costco; I’ll be, uh, disposing of the leftovers in my own way, thank you for asking).
It’s my second year in a row. I decided last year not to be a Halloween Scrooge as in previous years. Now, I’m “that guy” that gives away awesome full size candy bars instead of those “fun-sized” bars that even the littlest kids can plainly see contain a shortage of actual fun.
Seriously: how could a candy bar the size of my thumb actually be any fun?
At my sister’s house today my darling niece (dressed as Alice “from” Wonderland) came in with an armload of ‘free candy’ for her mom and me. (‘Free’ meaning the things she didn’t like.)
Discovered there were two ‘fun’ sizes: a rectangular one and a square that wasn’t even worth the trouble to unwrap.
But maybe that makes it the celery of the candy world: Chewing celery burns more calories than it provides, so perhaps you burn more calories wrestling the damned foil package open than the candy delivers.
By the way, you don’t have a location listed; we’ll need that for next year…
We got exactly one set of trick-or-treaters who came before dark, so they didn’t know we didn’t have candy. We did have a few suckers from gifts at school, but mom had just gotten out of the shower, I was asleep, and everyone else was out. And mom didn’t want to go as an exhibitionist.
My mom felt so bad she wouldn’t stop talking about it.
In a world in which we’re constantly told we have to do more with less, I salute you.
Seriously, there was one house along the route my kids and their friends took that gave full size candy bars. That person was the toast of the night when it came time to count loot. Even the parents were impressed.
Those aren’t fun for kids. Those are fun for adults on diets, who would feel deprived with no candy bars whatsoever, but who shouldn’t be eating full-size candy bars.
Good for you on the full-size candy bars: that was very sweet of you. I have a child who likes the fun size. We hold them back and save them for blood glucose lows. They are the perfect size and carb count to bring a low up pretty quickly. In her case, a full-size would be overkill.
Hah - I’m the anti-Malienation - I gave out crappy candy this year! I found the cheapest stuff I could find at Wal-Mart and gave that out, along with the year-old gummy body parts (they still tasted okay - that stuff will outlast all of us). I did give quite a bit of it - quantity to make up for quality. Maybe next year I’ll give out the good stuff again. We’ll see what kind of mood I’m in.
Alton Brown did a Good Eats on homemade halloween treats, including homemade candy corn. All the while I was thinking “you do realize that this stuff would all be trashed as soon as the kids get home, right?”
Although his “trick” popcorn ball with a brussels sprout inside was funny.
Our neighbor around the corner used to give out cans of vegetables and the like. I’ll never forget a little girl with teary eyes sobbing “Mommy, I got a can of soup.”
Someone in our neighborhood gave out the baby cans of soda - orange and grape Crush. TheKid received a full sized Snickers.
I gave out a mixture - the itty bitty Snickers/Milky Ways/3 Musketeers, Reeses and variations, Tootsie Rolls and variations, and a variety of super sour candies.
We gave away 15 or 16 bags of fun size bars. We started out doling out two pieces at a time, but after a while it became clear that we were going to run out before the trick-or-treating ended, so we switched to one per kid. No leftovers. I think we must have had 150-175 kids come by. I don’t think we’ll be going the full size route anytime soon.
