Halloween Trick-or-Treating – Is Your Candy Safe?
As a child, some of my best Halloween memories revolved around the bundle of loot I collected when going out trick-or-treating. I come from a family of sweet tooths, and I inherited the trait. My neighbors were very generous and my haul quite large.
But even in the pre-historic days of my childhood, stories of apples embedded with razors, poisoned candy and other horrors that awaited the unwary popped up as predictably as the jack-o-lanterns in people’s windows. To this day, I don’t know how many were real and how many were urban legends, but they scared my mother enough to forbid us from touching our loot until it passed parental inspection.
It seems that the fear of tainted goodies hasn’t gone away. Last year, one Denver walk-in clinic provided free x-rays of Halloween loot free of charge. And the lucky child got to take the x-ray home to parade at his next “show-and-tell.”
No parent wants to chance that their child will be maimed by some sicko’s idea of Halloween fun. Although there only seem to be isolated incidents of this kind of nastiness, one incident is too many if it touches your child.
There is always one sure-fire way to side-step the issue–just invite the kids to a fabulous Halloween party.
