When I was a little kid, Halloween was never about costumes. It was never about decorating. It wasn’t even about being scared. It was, year after year, about the candy.
Candy was the diabetic lifeblood of all Halloween industry in my youth. Of course, it was just as commercialized as it is now. However, as a child, it felt like all anybody ever wanted you to understand was that there was candy to be had, and lots of it.
I understood pretty immediately that candy was running the show, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the costumes were supposed to get more attention in this holiday. In reality, the idea of wearing a costume on Halloween was portrayed as some sort of key to getting the candy. Wear a costume, knock on a door, you get the candy. It was that simple. If your costume was cool/funny/convincing/scary, then extra points for you. Basically, costumes were like points on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” They didn’t matter.
As a result of this laser-beam focus on candy, kids my age quickly developed the skillset necessary to use the treats to their own advantage. Children learned what I’ll call the “Sweetconomy” at the same rate any normal child would learn a more important like swimming or the ability to speak. The Sweetconomy took center stage.
What the system boiled down to was that after your night of trick-or-treating or, more realistically, wearing a garbage bag and harassing strangers, you would inevitably end up at your house, a friend’s house or in a gutter, passed out due to excess sugar and an inability to comprehend the confectionary NASDAQ that was in play. From there, you would begin trading and bargaining with your friends and siblings, hoping to garner all your favorite candy and become the J. D. Rockefeller of both Almond Joy AND Mounds.
For my sisters and I, the destination was always my grandmother’s house. Growing up in a rural area didn’t mean stepping outside and walking door to door. It meant driving about 10 minutes down the road, parking and then walking door to door. Also, trick-or-treating consisted of visiting the houses of people we were related. This, shockingly, sucked some of the enchantment out of Halloween.
After making our rounds, my parents would drive us to my grandmother’s where the market would open. All three of us would dump our molded plastic pumpkins onto the shag carpet and begin sorting through the candy.
If you were savvy, like we were, you would divide your assets into three groups: Keepers, Barters, and Trash. Keepers were types of candies you would, under no circumstances, trade for any other kind. Barters were things that were to be considered for trade, depending on the value of the bartering party’s offer. Trash was simply that: candy you couldn’t care less about and would gladly give away to your fellow traders if they were interested. For me, Keepers were things like Hershey Miniatures, Smarties and Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins.
On very rare occasions, I would sacrifice one of my beloved pumpkins for the chancing of obtaining more Miniatures. That was a fair trade to me: one piece of chocolate for another. It doesn’t seem to make any sense at first glance. However, the pumpkin, which had peanut butter, was valued only slightly less than specific Hershey miniatures like Krackel and Mr. Goodbar. Those two offered as a set for what I then convinced myself to see as healthy, nutritious peanut butter? Sold.
There were separate trading regulations within in each subset of candy.There were all of the candies made with compressed, chalky sugar like Smarties, SweeTarts and Bottle Caps. There were the gummies, which consisted of most Trolli products, Starburst and wax vampire lips, which I never saw as a true candy but more as a precursor to chewing tobacco. It’s like they say: “Get’em while they’re young.”
Today, candy has been swallowed up into the giant advertisement that is Halloween. The holiday is less about even entertaining children and acts more as a preview trailer for autumn’s feature presentation, Thanksgiving. It’s a sugarcoated bump in the road before reaching the land of turkey, Macy’s and culturally uncomfortable elementary school plays.
Hopefully, I can teach the younger children in my family the importance of the Sweetconomy. I aids helps in business sense and lets you get the upper hand on those dreadful economics classes that will come no matter how hard you try to avoid them later in life. The attitude is always to get back to the basics and with Halloween, I couldn’t agree more. You don’t want to get caught with your Superman pants down, holding a bag of Jelly Belly when it’s clearly shaping up to be a Gobstoppers market day.
