Halloween Confidential

*The following may or may not be entirely true but should not be held against me, because I did it for my own good.  If I'd actually done it.  Which I may or may not have.

I've never been one of those girls who "forgets" to eat.  I've never gone out to dinner and ordered "just a small salad" unless I had every intention of pigging out at home after my date dropped me off.  I like food.  And I have bad fat habits that, if given in to, could lead to me needing to be removed from my apartment via crane after someone busted out a wall because I wouldn't fit through the door.  And the thought of all my neighbors (and the people back in TV Land who would be viewing my huge naked ass being air-lifted from my apartment on the evening news) is what keeps me from doing the following:

A) Eat nothing but Good n Plentys (my biggest vice) and espresso for breakfast, every single morning for the rest of my life, except once in a while when someone took me for pancakes and bacon.  Or donuts.

B) Eat popcorn for lunch and dinner, day after day after day after day after day, ad infintum.  (Okay, I actually DO kind of do this... occasionally.  If Dan weren't here and refused to eat popcorn as a meal, this would be happening wayyyy more frequently.  Why cook when there's popcorn?)

C)  Eat jalapeno poppers as a vegetable.  Dipped in Ranch.  (Because if it can be dipped in Ranch, it's a vegetable.  You can quote me on this.)

D)  Serve a meal made entirely of cheese prepared in different ways (queso, fried mozzarella sticks, fondue, wedges of Brie, and of course a mixed cheese platter).  GOD I love cheese.

E)  Always have buttercream frosting handy to dip a finger (knife, spoon, cookie, whatever) into, for the moments when pretty much all you want is buttercream frosting.  (Not just me, right?)

F) Have a little bread with my butter, as a side dish to go along with my popcorn, cheese, jalapeno poppers, and buttercream frosting.  (The Good n Plentys are only for breakfast.  Don't ask me how I know that they taste amazing with espresso.)

And the list goes on.

The sad and sorry truth is that I KNOW these things are bad for me and I avoid eating them, for the most part.  I also know that if they're in my house, they will get eaten.   By me.  Screw willpower... I can't eat it if it isn't here.  Period.

Which leads me to Halloween.

Specifically, to having bags and bowls of candy lying around, on the off chance that a stray child or two will wander up to my door and knock.

I used to buy the GOOD Halloween candy... Snickers, Butterfingers, Reese's... I was the neighbor with the mostest.  I wish I could say it was because I am a giving, wonderful person who suffered as a child by being given apples and those hard, disgusting pieces of orange and black wrapped taffy (what IS that shit?  Has anyone ever actually eaten it?) in my trick or treat bag, but the cold hard truth is that I didn't want to be left with a bunch of candy I didn't like.  Now you know.

Since we only got a few trick or treaters each year, we were left with a considerable amount of candy on November 1st.  Since waste is sinful (I know my Bible when it's handy, yo) we would be forced to eat the leftovers, which would usually be gone by November 2nd.

4 years ago I decided to buy the kind of crappy candy that wouldn't tempt me.  I bought three huge bags of these gummy things shaped like brains and internal organs.  I thought they were cute and kids would love them and most of all, there wasn't a chance in hell that I would eat them.  And neither would Dan.

That year, we got approximately 5 trick or treaters.  I put all the candy in freezer bags and stored them in my cupboard, where I promptly forgot about them.

Until the following October, when I (don't judge me) took them out, dusted them off, poured them in a bowl and handed them out again to the same 5 trick or treaters that we'd had the year before.

The next day Dan said, "Want me to just throw these away?"

Me:  *suffering from a rare bout of hoarding behavior... seriously rare for me... I throw everything away*  "No... I don't want to waste them.  Just bag 'em up and I'll think of something to do with them."

Which I did.  I put them back in the cupboard.

And handed them out again to the same 5 kids who had shown up the previous two years.

I suck.

But I did it again, the year after that.

Okay, here's the truth:  I didn't throw the candy away until I was packing up the kitchen to move to New York last April.

And I kind of didn't want to do it then, only it seemed silly to drag four year old candy 3,000 miles across the country, just to be handed out YET AGAIN to children on the east coast.  (Even though there was a huge part of my brain that thought that would be pretty awesome.  Bwaaaahahahahahahahahaaaa!  Even if I would be the only one laughing.)

(I don't know what's wrong with me.  I really don't.)

This year I'm torn:  Do I buy the stuff that I know I'm going to eat?  Because I'm pretty sure at the most we will get two trick or treaters.  Or do I carry on the tradition and buy the worst candy I can possibly find and see how many years in a row I can hand it out?

Decisions, decisions...