Real Halloween Nightmares

I have always loved candy, but I wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid. The prevailing sentiment in the churches we attended was that Halloween was a “devil’s holiday.” We had “harvest parties” instead. I certainly never was lacking for candy around the 31st of October.

My kids haven’t gone trick-or-treating either, but that’s mostly because we’ve lived overseas for most of their lives; last year, we were here, but Aidan had a broken leg and getting him around to go trick-or-treating was pretty much out of the question. So far, then, I haven’t had to give a great deal of thought to Halloween candy.

If you’ve read my blog before, you know I’m not opposed to letting my kids have sugar. We went to an Easter Egg hunt at the state park in springtime, which (brilliantly, I thought) had receptacles for unwanted candy to be redistributed to needy kids who hadn’t been able to attend. I think the food traditions in a culture–trick-or-treating, cupcakes at school for birthdays–are kind of nice. If there’s any beef I have at all, it’s that the ordinary days are a bit out of control.

[What’s the point banning birthday cupcakes at school if the kids get access to soda and sweet snacks from vending machines at school?!?]

Simplify our ordinary days, that we may be able to enjoy a good celebration.

The last thing I want to do is be a killjoy who takes candy from kids. But what if that candy takes kids from their parents?

In West Africa, an estimated 200,000 children are enslaved on cocoa plantations. And major chocolate producers like Hershey’s get their cocoa from these places.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Fair trade chocolate exists. When you buy a certified fair trade product (like chocolate or coffee), you pay a little extra, but it means that the working conditions have been found to meet certain minimum criteria, and that the workers have been fairly compensated for their work, and, most importantly, that they are not victims of trafficking. (People who have been moved to a different location and/or held there under force, fraud, or coercion.)Chocolate’s no longer an exotic luxury; for most of us, it can be had pretty cheaply. But the mini-bars and fun-sizes come cheap at a very, very high cost to the children whose labor brings them to us.