One daughter was home today, doing work for her other two jobs. Her main income-producing job is as a substitute teacher in our local school district. In the past, she has mentioned the goodies that teachers and staff bring in regularly, some for rewards for students, some for the teachers only.
The other day I saw a memo being passed around social media encouraging people to give out non-candy treats this Halloween. Suggestions included packaged chips, pretzels, cookies and mini muffins, protein bars, pouches or boxes of juice, packages of ramen (ramen has been a popular food with teens and tweens for the last several years), microwave mac and cheese, and pudding cups. Many people on social media complained about not giving out candy to kids. But others chimed in that their kids already get a lot of candy in their everyday life and might appreciate a non-candy treat. I know my own kids regularly got candy at church/Sunday school and at youth group. (We homeschooled through 8th grade, so the only candy they got in those years of school was controlled by me.)
I asked my daughter if kids get much candy at school these days. She said yes, usually as rewards. One teacher she regularly subs for allows his students to earn points to be spent in the classroom "store" on Fridays. They earn points for good behavior, completing assignments on time, and good citizenship in the classroom. The store contains various snack foods, but also full-sized candy bars. His classroom is a SPED class for high school, and he's found success in getting student cooperation by offering those sorts of rewards. My daughter agreed that many kids these days have lots of opportunities to eat candy.
In our house, we've been at least offering a non-candy treat, some years only giving out non-candy treats, for many, many years. The first year we did this, I offered a choice between cheese and cracker hand-i-snacks and a traditional candy bar. All of the hand-i-snacks were gone in 30 minutes. We've also given out packages of pretzels, mini playdough, containers of slime, and small bags with stickers, tattoos, Halloween-themed trinkets and small amounts of candy. For the last several years we've given out individual packages of cookies. We've had kids be super-duper excited about getting these candy-alternatives. We've had parents thank us for giving out something other than candy. And we've had a couple of older kids be not quite so excited, but always said thank you.
My daughter said she couldn't remember when we just gave out candy. I then went on to tell her about my mother's recollections about trick-or-treating in the 1940s. My grandparents moved around the country a lot during the war, following my grandfather's job working for a military contractor. So the treats my mother received varied from region to region. But for the most part, she said her small bag was filled with home-grown fruit (apples, mostly), nuts in the shell, homemade cookies, small paper bags of popped corn, an occasional homemade popcorn ball, a couple of small pieces of candy (Tootsie Rolls were popular), and a penny or two. She said the pennies were one of the most exciting things to receive, as it meant she could go with her own mother to the store and choose a piece of candy, or she could put trick-or-treat pennies together with other saved pennies and buy a small plaything, like a game of Jacks. In my mother's day, receiving anything felt special this one day of the year. Aside from birthdays and Christmas, receiving gifts and prizes of any sort just didn't happen. Any rewards they received were often in the form of award ribbons, not toys, playthings, or candy. These days, kids get prizes and rewards all of the time.
My daughter was very surprised to hear of how little candy my mother actually received trick-or-treating. In my kids' childhood, they came home with bags of almost exclusively candy.
In my own childhood, we received a lot of candy, but also occasional cookies, baggies of chips or popped corn, pennies, some apples, and chewable waxed novelties. But it was mostly candy.
Perhaps because my mother had received so many non-candy treats on Halloween as a child, it seemed perfectly okay to offer kids cookies, apples, baggies of potato chips, and pennies when we would run out of Halloween candy in our own home in the 1960s. Our neighborhood had so many children, I'm sure we had around 100 trick or treaters every year, and it was practically a given we'd run out of the "real" treats. Were kids always happy to get an apple in the 1960s? I don't think so. I'm not sure I'd give an apple these days. I would fear it would be thrown through a window by some unsatisfied trick-or-treater.
But I do think there's a place for some non-candy treats as handouts for Halloween. Kids will get plenty of candy this Friday. My house will just provide some variety to their trick-or-treat bags.
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