My 10yo is the opposite of this; she doesn’t have a sweet tooth and what she loves is dressing up in costume, then slowly mozying, looking at the decorations and chatting with the people handing out candy. Therefore, she can never trick-or-treat with friends because they leave her in the dust!

In our family, we’ve always emphasized the social experience over the competitive game of “scoring the most candy.” Costumes, decorating, giving, interacting with friends and neighbors were important to us. And we always ended up with more than enough candy to make us sick and fat anyway. And we didn’t really need Halloween to get and eat candy, if we really wanted it. If I get it myself, I can get the kinds I most like.

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We all have our funny stories to tell about our history.

I like to think that one of my “defining moments” was when I jogged over to the neighbors house, found him in his garage, and I said, literally, “Did you know that your back yard is on fire?” He said, “You’re kidding.” And I said, “No.” I was not kidding. I’m kind of literal minded that way. It occurred to me to ask if he knew if his back yard was on fire because I found him puttering with a boat motor in his garage — as one might do if one was unaware of the explosion and fire under pine trees in the back that could easily destroy both of our houses. He ran to his back yard to pick up his garden hose and fight the fire.

Our family did tend to be “calm under fire” like that: What happened a minute or two before then was that we were eating dinner in our dining room and we heard a “pop” of a small explosion outside, and saw several small “fire balls” drop into our back yard. My father got up and told my mother to use the hose in the front yard, my sister to call 911, me to go tell the neighbor, while he went into the back yard to fight the fire with the garden hose there. And that’s what we did. By the time the fire department arrived, from a block away, the fire was out.