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Halloween means that our house gets flooded with a ton of candy. We’ve been trying to avoid making candy a central fixation for the kids, so 2 years ago Jen came up with the brilliant plan of introducing the Halloween Witch. When the kids come home with their loot after trick-or-treating, we put two bowls in front of them. One bowl is for them, the other is for the Halloween Witch. They get to put their candy in the bowls of their choice, then they leave the bowls out. The next morning, the bowl for the Halloween Witch is empty and its contents have been traded for toys and books.

In 2004 when we first did it, Cole was 3 and Ally was 1 1/2, so Ally didn’t get to participate. Cole didn’t really understand what was going on, and wound up giving away a good chunk of his candy. In return he got a pretty cool floor puzzle that he played with for ages and we figured that all was well. But in 2005, almost a full year later and just 2 days before Halloween, without any prompting Cole proclaimed “this year I don’t want to give anything to the Halloween Witch!” Jen and I were floored. We hadn’t talked about the witch for a whole year but clearly the concept had made a big impression on Cole. So when it came time to divvy up the candy, Cole agonized about each and every piece of candy that he put into the witch’s bowl, ending up giving away about 1/3rd of his candy. Ally on the other hand wanted to give it all away. Cole was mortified. Their conversation went something like this:

• Cole: “Ally, do you really want to give away all your candy?”
• Ally: “Yes!”
• Cole: “But Ally, you know that tomorrow morning you’ll have no candy!!“
• Ally: “That’s ok!!”

Cole was totally baffled, and in the end we only let Ally give away about 2/3rds of her candy because we were afraid that the next morning she’d be really sad. But in the morning, Cole got 1 book from the Halloween Witch and Ally got 3 books and she was really happy. Cole didn’t seem to upset about it, and so we figured that was the end of it.

Now it’s 2006. Cole is 5, Ally is 3 1/2. So when we visited the pumpkin patch this year to gather up pumpkins to carve (and where incidentally the kids got to go on a very fun pony ride) we talked a little bit about the Halloween Witch. We expected it to be a repeat of last year, but to our surprise the kids did a complete flip-flop. Cole proudly announced his intention to give exactly half of his candy to the witch and Ally declared that she wouldn’t be giving any candy to the witch! So this year at the pumpkin patch, the conversation went like this:

• Cole: “Ally, you’re not going to give away any candy?”
• Ally: “No!”
• Cole: “But Ally, then you won’t get any toys!“
• Ally: “That’s ok!!”

Cole is destined to never understand his sister.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Family Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.