Trick or treaters

I had a few more this year than in recent years. (Still not MANY, still not as many as I remember from when I lived in Illinois).

I think that was more due to the fact that a couple houses close to me had their lights on this year - a small cluster of houses giving out candy is more likely for parents to stop with their kids than one lone house.

Most of the kids were fairly little ones - 3s, 4s, and 5s, it looked like. No teenagers this year other than an older brother or sister shepherding their younger sibling around. Few tweens, most of the tweens I saw were in the company of parents plus younger siblings. Mostly superhero costumes this year, though there were a couple witches and princesses, and a ladybug among the girls.

I'm guessing most of the older kids were doing some kind of event. I know a lot of the churches had fall-fests or outright Hallowe'en parties (depending upon their theological stance).

I've read that trick or treating is dying out - safety concerns (and yeah, traffic - there are always those few idiots who drive too fast on my street and I am like, "Don't you know there are little kids out tonight?") and also the less-likely but more ominous worry about someone doing something bad to the candy. Or health concerns; I'm sure there are some who'd like to ban it in the name of "preventing childhood obesity." (I ate A LOT of candy as a kid. Well, A LOT in the sense of what I was allowed. And I was actually a skinny little kid - I didn't get heavy until after puberty. Of course, I also ran around a lot and played outside almost every day, and my parents saw to it that I ate healthfully most of the time). And I know there are religious groups who have objections. And, I don't know if kids still play pranks or not - I've never had my house egged or anything - but I tend to think that these days, the kids out trick or treating would tend not to be the ones tp-ing or egging houses. (I could be wrong on that. When I was a kid, the only people we ever heard of "tp'ing" a house was either kids doing it to the members of a rival sports team, or the really "bad" kids doing it to a teacher they disliked)

(Okay, wait. One year someone threw a pumpkin at my mailbox and destroyed it. But that was a couple days after halloween)

But you know? As I've said before, my happy memories of trick or treating as a kid were not so much getting to gorge on candy (or getting candy other than what my parents sanctioned and would buy) - it was more the opportunity to dress up in a funny outfit and walk around the neighborhood after dark. As a kid, I had a pretty strict curfew (in by dark unless I was with an adult) so getting to walk around the neighborhood and knock on the doors of people I knew, but didn't know that well, was kind of a thrill. (I was very much a goody-two-shoes as a child. I still AM, in many ways.)

And I know, there are lots of "safe" events and trunk-or-treats and stuff, but my big happy memory of it was the strangeness of getting to walk up and down my (long) street in the dark, and saying hello to people that I sort of knew, but didn't know well. My brother and I would eat some of the candy we got, we'd parcel it out over the next couple of weeks consuming the "good" stuff (anything with chocolate and, for me, anything with nuts) and the stuff we didn't care for hung around until our mom threw it away around Thanksgiving. I don't remember ever having a stomachache after Hallowe'en....though I do remember some of my classmates being out sick the next day. If there had been "donate to the troops" programs when I was a kid (a dentist here in town does that), I probably would have picked out the peanut butter cups and KitKat bars, and happily sent off the rest of it.

So I sat in my big comfortable chair, which gave me a good view of the porch, and knitted on the second sleeve of Rosedale (not-complex pattern, so I could pick it up and put it down as necessary) while I waited.

Also still learning on the diet. My big happy revelation of this morning was that the plum chipotle grilling sauce I like so much for chicken is NOT off limits - it's low enough in sodium (15 mg per tablespoon, and I don't use a whole lot more than that per chicken breast). I guess what I interpret as a "salty" taste in it is the chipotle.  I also looked at the nutritional information on the bag of the little KitKat bars I was handing out - and if I eat one at a time, they are low enough in sugars to be okay. (And I probably, really, don't need to restrict sugars THAT hard - it's just, I want to prevent future issues, and if it helps my blood pressure, all the better). And the little packs of M and Ms I was handing out are okay too. So the few leftovers I have (I was pretty generous, gave a couple things to each kid) can be occasional treats for me.