Halloween

It's not Halloween yet until tomorrow and I'm already wondering why we do all the things we do for our kids on Halloween. I definitely bought into the idea of dressing them up in costumes because seeing babies and toddlers in costumes is just too cute to resist. But I'm starting to wonder about the whole trick-or-treating thing. I don't think I'm very fanatical about not having my child eat candy but it is nice that she doesn't know about candy (until today). The way I see it, there's no nutritional value what-so-ever to candy and it only causes more harm than good. I can't even get her to let me brush her teeth these days so avoiding candy is probably the best preventive measure against cavities. I always figured that she will find out eventually from her friends anyway so why not prolong it as long as possible? Well, I just kicked myself today.

We joined a few of her friends to go "trick-or-treating" today because a local downtown area was having a child-friendly event for early trick-or-treating. It's been a while since we've seen most of Scarlett's friends and I figured that it would be really cute to get pictures of them all in their costumes. I didn't think too much about the actual trick-or-treating part. In fact, I brought her costume and totally forgot about her trick-or-treating bag (we had to use a tiny ziploc bag that I found in her diaper bag). Everything started out well in that she was more than willing to get into her monkey costume after seeing her friend dressed up in his tiger outfit. Then they hit the stores for candy. I noticed that all the parents had to encourage their kids to go up to the store manager to say "trick-or-treat". Scarlett didn't understand why or what she was doing but she's a smart kid, so she did what others were doing. But as I stood there watching her, it occurred to me that it's very odd (almost wrong in some way) we are encouraging them to ask total strangers for candy handouts. Why do they need candy anyway and is it a good thing to teach little kids to ask strangers for candy, albeit indirectly? The more I thought about it as I watched her reactions, the more I wondered why I was doing it. Then of course, all her friends knew about candy and were bugging their parents to open their candies. Scarlett watched with fascination, looked at her candies, and started to try and open them. She then resorted to asking me to open them and I kept stalling thinking that maybe she'll forget about them later. Well, when we got into the car to leave, I finally relented and opened a Starburst for her. Goodness, it's just a piece of candy, not poison! But for some reason, I had an immense feeling of guilt after opening that piece of candy for her. What did Scarlett say as she sat there eating it on our drive home? "Mama, it's yummy!" Sigh...