the other brother: Happy Halloween

For the past two years, Hannah and I had somehow missed out on Halloween in San Angelo. The first year, she was in an apartment complex with no kids and I was moving into a different apartment in NJ. Last year, we were prepared, but learned much too late that "Halloween" in San Angelo isn't always on Halloween. We had candy ready, but were out on the observed night. When we learned how the holiday is celebrated in town, we raced home, but the kids were done for the night.

This year, we thought we were prepared. Four-bags-of-candy prepared. Between the last two years in Texas and the previous two years in a condo complex (on the outskirts of town), we hadn't encountered many trick-or-treaters. So, four bags of candy should be fine, right?

We started by handing out two pieces to every kid. Based on our past experience, we still would have been left with a ton of candy at the end of the night. We got a little worried in the first hour when we started running low.

So we did the initial check of the pantry. We had some Dove dark chocolate individually-wrapped squares. Perfect.

Ten minutes later, we had to raid the pantry again. "Hey, we have a bunch of gum. Kids like gum! Who cares if it's sugarless."

Another 15 minutes later we started digging deeper into the cabinets. "Hershey's 100 calorie dark chocolate. Great!"

You can see where this is going.

We went through some individually-wrapped Easter candy that was in the freezer. Then some snack-sized popcorn bags. Then mixed nuts. When I had to bust out the mini-Clif Bars, we got very nervous.

Hannah found a full box of Quaker granola bars. She poured the contents into the "candy" bowl. She didn't tell me what else was in that granola bar box.

More and more kids came to the door. Some were genuinely excited about the Clif Bars and granola bars, others just thought there were getting big candy bars. Hannah just kept dropping things in their baskets.

Then she told me what else was she had slipped in...