By Sydney Young
We’ve all been there. You just came home from a long night of trick-or-treating and you’re proud of the bounty collected in your plastic pumpkin. Then enter your parents, hungry for the candy you have piled onto the floor. My dad’s favorite? Dots. I was more than happy to let him have those. Or my mom’s favorite, licorice. But, when it comes to the holy trinity of Halloween candy, don’t even think about taking away Almond Joy’s, Reese’s, or 100 Grand Bars from my bucket.
Halloween was the perfect low stakes holiday filled with sugary sweets and sweet looking costumes, making it one of my personal favorites.
Then, I aged out of the trick-or-treating fun. Maybe you had younger siblings you had to walk the neighborhood with now, but if you are also the baby of the family like me, you ran out of such luck at age ten.
Halloween became the perfect time to carve pumpkins with friends and pass out candy to little kids in the cutest costumes. But now that we are in college, no little trick-or-treaters in sight, and only a few costumes to plan ourselves, the nostalgia of Halloweens’ past is setting in.
Undoubtedly there is a certain nostalgia to eating half your candy while you are still walking from door to door, being scared by lit up houses and ghost animatronics.
So, an ode to trick or treating, and the delicious candy it produced.
A beautiful perk of being in college is that we can buy our own candy now. No more sifting through the butterscotch hard candies from grandma; or pretending to be excited about the apples that the dentist would always give out.
Although I will miss making the perfect route to all the houses that would give out king-size candy bars every year. Those houses are truly the backbone of a well-rounded candy collection.
The perfect Halloween candy bag includes the following items: the already mentioned holy trinity, as well as Skittles, Milk Duds, Twix, and Starbursts. Sprinkle in enough candy corn, and a few extra mini Krackle bars to give to my parents, and that is enough to satisfy my childhood sweet tooth.
My mom would always make me save my candy and let me put one in my lunchbox every day until it all ran out. Play your cards right and you can stretch the sweetest holiday out until Valentine’s Day.
What would be in your perfect trick-or-treating collection? All chocolate, or a mixture of everything? Let us know! And have a very happy and spooky Halloween.
