Ugh. Halloween. I love everything about this holiday, except the candy.
I like the traditional flirting with the scary and the dead, which is a universal part of every human culture in one form or another. I like the combination of pagan and "holy" traditions. I like the costumery, since we are not a big mardi gras culture so don't have the dress-up occasions otherwise (we don't celebrate Purim...) I like the fall harvest theme to it, since we don't have an Oktoberfest in this country. I even like the concept of trick or treating -- it's just about the only way we still have in this day and age to randomly connect with neighbors, and it's good practice for otherwise shy kids to introduce themselves to strangers under controlled circumstances.
But the candy. Egads. It's disgusting. And now that the razor blade in the apple mostly-urban-legend fears have pervaded our culture, it is simply not possible to give out anything that doesn't come in a wrapper with a recognizable name on it.
So this is my dilemma, and an open question I ask to my gentle readers: is there such a thing as a healthful treat you can give away to Trick or Treaters that meets the "comes in a wrapper" criteria?
The only thing I can really come up with are individual raisin boxes, but those also have problems. The single boxes don't have the cellophane wrappers. And frankly I'd be TPing the house that gave our raisins, at least in another era.
(When my sisters and I lived in Ohio there was a dentist at the end of the block who gave out toothbrushes for Halloween. It was the least visited house in the neighborhood.)
There's fruit wraps/roll, but, really, these are not only expensive but if you look at the ingredients they're not that much better than the usual candy.
In Cleveland, there was a middle eastern bakery that made fantastic spinach pockets. As soon as I got my license I used to go there to lay in a supply to eat for lunch or whatever whenever I could. They also had these wonderful sesame candies, of sorts -- they were small bars, with honey as the sweetener, and they were wrapped individually. Just perfect -- not terribly junky, but the right size for giveaways. I'd give these out if I could find them -- I haven't seen them for 27 years now, though.
You'd think a chain like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods would've tapped into the yuppie-foodie angst here and figured out some kind of packaged halloween candy to give out. I haven't detected that.
So, confession: we bought a bag of junk to give out, as usual. I feel like a hypocrite because there's no way we'd let Duncan and Iz eat any of the things we're giving out. (As far as Duncan goes, he loves to Trick or Treat, but since he's sensitive to chocolate, we've gotten away in the past with a subtle confiscation of almost all his candy - he usually gets one or two pieces of toffee or caramel and that's the end of that.)
And to further the hypocrisy, we're moderately extreme on even the very idea of candy. We just don't give it to the boys, period. The closest we get to dispensing candy ourselves is building a gingerbread house at Christmas.
Ideas? What are you doing for Halloween?
