Halloween killjoys want to take the the candy out of kids’ loot bags

I am not going to get into some cranky old-guy whinge about how Halloween was so much better when I was a kid.

Yeah, we roamed unescorted far and wide wearing cheesy home-made costumes and carrying an old pillowcase growing heavy with sugary loot. We were oblivious to the threat of homicidal child-sex predators.

Our biggest worry wasn't getting an apple with a needle or razor blade in it; it was the prospect of someone's home-made unwrapped popcorn ball contaminating our favourite candies.

I don't mind modern Halloween. For one thing, more pre-school kids get a chance to go out now, escorted by their parents, than when back in the day. They toddle up to the door and stare up blankly until dad prompts a them to a "trick-or-treat" (whatever happened to "Halloween apples!"), which triggers the dispensing of a small, chocolatey confection.

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But apparently Halloween has not escaped the attention of what Denny Boyd, the late, great Vancouver Sun columnist, used to call "higher purpose persons." Some people seem intent on turning a night of fun and gorging into a teaching moment.

Meet Maggie Cordina, an Ottawa mother and web entrepreneur, who's urged her neighbours to give kids a "healthy treat" instead of the usual chocolate bars, suckers and candy corn (bagged, hopefully).

“I think we should change the perspective on what a ’treat’ can be,” Cordina told the National Post.

“They also took Halloween costumes out of schools, so why not sugary junk? The problem is, the kids who eat healthy feel left out just like they did for costumes.”

So, what will Cordina be handing out? Granola bars, juice boxes, packs of unpopped corn and stickers, according to the Post.

Cordina said she was partly motivated by her young son's conditioned disinterest in chocolate and sweets because, she says, she's trained his palate.

“We cannot take away the fun of trick or treating from him," she told the Post, leaving unanswered the question of what happens to toe "unhealthy" stuff he hauls home Halloween night.

Cordina's not going as far as the the North Dakota mom who's made international headlines by announcing she'll give trick-or-treaters she considers too chubby letters for their parents warning about the dangers of obesity.

"I just want to send a message to the parents of kids that are really overweight," the unidentified Fargo woman told a radio show, according to Valley News Live.

"I think it's just really irresponsible of parents to send them out looking for free candy just 'cause all the other kids are doing it."

[ Related: Woman to hand out letters, not candy to overweight kids on Halloween ]

That prompted this reaction from Frank Gray, a columnist for the Journal-Gazette in Fort Wayne, Ind.:

"Well, if you come to my house, I don’t care how fat you are. I’ll give you a piece of candy. So I guess you can blame me in part for what some people call the obesity epidemic in America."

Why do so many modern parents have to suck the unstructured fun out of their kids' lives?

The Stir, a parenting web site, notes Halloween is "the holiday where we throw conventional wisdom out the window and encourage our kids to wander the streets at night and take candy from strangers. Gotta love it!"

For helicopter parents, though, it's hell. Dangers lurk everywhere, from potentially poisoned candy to long-term trauma from encountering scary monsters.

Take a breath, says Frank Furedi, a British sociologist and author of Paranoid Parenting, Culture of Fear.

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“Parents are under relentless pressure to be accountable for whatever happens to their children, so if kids put on weight, we kind of obsess about it and then blame the parents,” he told the Post. “The way your child looks is now a reflection on you. If your child is handsome or beautiful, then that’s a statement on mommy and daddy.”

For a common sense view, here's Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity expert at the University of Ottawa. He doesn't hand out sugary goodies (kids get glow-in-the-dark wands and swords), but says there's no harm in giving out candy on Halloween.

“I think we should be worried much more about what we hand out on the remaining 364 days of the year," he told the Post.