The Halloween Record

Newsletter 2025-11-02

We came. We saw. We collected. For another Halloween, my daughters went all-out trying to beat our all-time candy record. It was a heroic and exhausting attempt that came down to the last few pieces. To the victor go the Starbursts.

Before my crew could beg for candy across our suburb, they had to decide on a group costume. This year’s negotiations were as fraught as ever. The two early frontrunners were Alice in Wonderland and the founding fathers. Neither received the necessary four votes while also avoiding mom’s veto. The problem with the founding fathers was that costumes would be expensive. You need a lot of heavy fabric to warn people that the British are coming. As for Alice in Wonderland, only Mae loves that movie. It also had a shortage of good characters. Nobody wanted to dress up as a human playing card or a giant caterpillar. Both would make it hard to clamber in and out of the van on Halloween night. The kids needed to be both cool and unencumbered. Nothing in fashion is ever that simple.

With Halloween fast approaching, one of the girls randomly suggested that they all be fairies. Everyone was immediately on board. I’ve never seen them agree to something so fast in their lives. Rather than being suspicious, I bought fairy wings before they could change their minds. The concept was as amorphous as it was cheap. As long as the girls had wings, they could dress however they wanted. Lola said she felt like our costumes were low effort, which they absolutely were. That was my favorite part. Bowing to spousal pressure (as always), I took the kids to Goodwill to flesh out their outfits. They were thrilled. It was the first time they’ve been able to individualize their costumes however they wanted. Waffle decided that her fairy needed jeans and a jean jacket for maximum denim, while Mae picked a knit flower sweater for more of a hippie vibe. Betsy chose a flowing green dress to be an elegant forest fairy. Lucy rounded out the group as a posh fairy in a stylish black dress with a white shawl. It was the kind of shopping spree my budget could handle. Lola got in on the fun by buying a pink costume ball gown online. The girls wanted me to wear a dress as well, but I did that a few years ago when we all went as beauty queens. I can only handle being pretty once per lifetime. Instead, I dressed in black because because that’s what I could cobble together from what was already in my closet. If that didn’t express my true inner self, I don’t know what would.

We had a chance to use our costumes two weekends in a row. Our town hosts a major trunk-or-treating event that draws thousands of kids annually. Beforehand, we took our traditional group Halloween pictures on our front steps. There was a huge delay after I set up the camera out front. Only three of the kids showed up. We had to wait another half hour until Lola finished helping Betsy with some last minute hair changes and accessorizing. The photos themselves only took a few minutes. I’ve become a pro at snapping off a thousand in quick succession and then picking out the only one where everyone has their eyes open. After pictures, Betsy broke my heart: She said she was too old for trunk-or-treating. She had found going last year to be extremely embarrassing. Her only friends there were working the booths handing out candy, not trick-or-treating themselves. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but it was a close call. She assured me that she would come out for real trick-or-treating the following weekend. Regretfully, I left her behind. The insatiable quest for candy waits for no one.

That’s a lie. This year, it waited for us. At previous events, we showed up right at the start, when booths were conserving candy to make sure they had enough to make it through the whole session. My brother-in-law, Jerry, showed up with his kids at the end when the booths were looking to get rid of their leftover candy. He beat our totals in a fraction of the time. This year, we copied him. I’m never too proud to steal a good idea. We showed up late hoping to swoop in for the remains like sugar vultures. It seemed to be a mistake. It took us twenty minutes just to get through the line to get in. The crowds were huge and still firmly in place as it got dark. I cursed the good weather for enabling people to stay out late. Finally, with half an hour left, more reasonable parents took their kids home. My children got to work, looting and pillaging at high speeds. We ran into some of Betsy’s friends, who were unafraid to trick-or-treat among the little kids. We told them to text Betsy. They did, and she showed up in full costume a few minutes later. She hung out with her friends instead of her family. She wasn’t too cool for trunk-or-treating, but she was too cool for us. Fair enough. The late arrival strategy ended up paying off. In past years, the kids came away with a light dusting of candy after hours of work. This time, I’d estimate they had ten pounds between their bags. It was a solid start, but it was still just an appetizer. The main candy feast was yet to come.

The following Friday, it was game time. To fuel up everyone before our night of gluttony, I ordered pizza. That would prove to be a bad move, but I didn’t know it yet. As the kids suited up, another of Betsy’s friends arrived. This year, I agreed to let an extra child accompany us. Betsy’s friend recently moved here from Kuwait and had never experienced Halloween. My goal was to make her think that all Americans collect their body weight in candy in a single night. Her costume was a rubber shark head. I offered to let her borrow a set of wings to become a fairy shark, but she wasn’t ready for that level of awesomeness. We loaded into my van at exactly 6 p.m. when trick-or-treating was officially set to start. I didn’t want to waste a single second. As I pulled out from in front of our house, I’m surprised the tires didn’t squeal.

Leading up to trick-or-treating, I’d made a big deal about how this year we were finally going to go to the richest neighborhood in town. We never made it there in the past, always getting distracted by closer houses. I fell into the same trap this year. The problem is I treat trick-or-treating like a video game. I can’t run past gold coins and power-ups sitting on the ground. I have to collect them all. Instead of immediately driving to the other side of our suburb, I stopped on our own street and deployed the kids. They piled out like they were jumping from an attack helicopter on an urban assault. From there, my role diminished greatly. In the past, I rolled down my window to point out the best houses and routes. This year, they didn’t need me. Betsy was their commander on the ground.

The girls walked up the entire street, hitting every participating house along the way. It was much faster than having them get in and out of the van at each stop. I only drove them between clusters of houses when the spacing was more than a few blocks. By the end of the night, Betsy racked up thirteen thousand steps. She wasn’t messing around. When they did get in the van, they would dump their candy bags into the plastic tote in the back. Carrying that extra weight from house to house would have slowed them down. I had a separate container for our guest so she could return home with her own spoils. More importantly, it was so she wouldn’t spoil our competition. We set our record of sixty pounds two years prior with exactly four kids collecting. I intended to break the record fair and square with four kids trying again.

We weaved down street after street, always aiming toward the rich neighborhood but never actually getting there. There were too many good houses along the way. As I drove, I played a Halloween playlist. That lasted about ten minutes. There are exactly four good Halloween songs. After that, Lola and I listened to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers while she cross stitched. I tried wearing my fairy wings in the van to show I was part of the team, but they blocked my blind spots. For the kids, on the other hand, the light-up fairy wings were a huge asset. I could always see them in the dark, no matter how far down the street they wandered. I’m going to require light-up outfits for all future Halloween nights. I might require them for regular nights, too.

The kids were relentless, hitting house after house without complaint. Halfway through, however, they got thirsty. I was glad they finally said something. I was parched myself but didn’t want to be the weak link. That salty pizza had come back to bite us. We swung by the house to rehydrate. In less than ten minutes, we were back out the door. We kept going until our guest had to go home. Her dad cruelly picked her up with half an hour left in the trick-or-treating window. Before she left, she had to transfer her candy haul from our canvas Halloween bag into a container of her own. Her dad didn’t bring one that was big enough. He underestimated my power. I sent her home with the hard-sided Aldi grocery tote she had been filling in the back of the van. She better return it because it’s Lola’s favorite. Generational feuds have been started over less. With only family members left, we resumed our route. For the final minutes, we stuck to streets close to home. We kept going until the last second, knocking on the final door at 8:59 p.m.. Whatever our score, we had given it everything we had. All that was left to do was check the numbers.

Back at home, we dumped all the bags into a big, blue tote. Betsy could barely lift it. We weighed her and then weighed her holding the tote. This year, she was strong enough to do it on her own. In previous years we had to distribute the weight between various bags to keep her from toppling over. We looked down at the scale. We were shocked. We had collected exactly sixty pounds, down to the nearest tenth of a pound, tying our record from two years ago. It was too perfect to be a coincidence. Perhaps sixty pounds of candy is some kind of natural limit, like the speed of light. You can’t go beyond it without breaking physics as we know it. The next morning, however, Lola was cleaning up the empty trick-or-treating bags. She found a Tootsie Pop inside of one of them. The kids actually collected sixty pounds plus one sucker. It was a record by half of an ounce. I was so proud of us. When we put our minds to it, we can do anything, as long as that “anything” is getting a bunch of candy.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James