To the editor,
Halloween isn’t a big deal in our house. Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t “anti-Halloween” or anything, but it’s not a major event on our calendar. Every year we buy a bunch of candy and happily hand it out to neighbourhood kids. Ruth and Avery also went around to some friends’ dressed as cats. It’s all good fun.
This year, I stayed home with Avery while Kristen walked Ruth around. Instead of being interrupted every 20 seconds with a knock on the door that makes my dog lose her mind, I decided to put some candy in a big bowl and watch what happened on our video door bell.
I’d like to share the results of the night with you.
After about 45 minutes the bowl was empty and I didn’t think much of it. I refilled it and went back inside. I checked the camera again after about another 10 minutes and it was empty again.
Now I’m going to stop you right there. We all know what happened. Yes, I was fully prepared that this would likely take place, I was just curious to see it.
As expected, after I refilled the bowl some kids came running across my lawn, looked around, and dumped the bowl into the one boy’s bag, much to the annoyance of the other kids in his pack, who then fought to take candy from his stash to make up for it. They moved on and I snickered (not an intentional pun, but I can’t deny Snickers might have been involved).
I was wondering if the earlier supply had suffered the same fate, so I rolled back the tape to just before I refilled it.
I watched as every kid – largely unsupervised – came to my door, saw the bowl and took one (or sometimes two) pieces of candy. Eventually, the bowl was picked clean “naturally” and two girls came to find an empty bowl along with another boy. Looking around, they took candy from their own bags and put some in my empty bowl for other kids.
About three seconds after they left is when I opened the door and refilled the supply.
So yes, I saw the greedy kid that took all the candy, but I was expecting to see that.
I never thought I’d see kids give their own candy for future trick-or-treaters to enjoy when they came across the empty bowl.
Those are the kids I want my girls to be. No one will ever know what they did for people they didn’t know.
Joshua Bailey
Listowel
