It's a trick dealing with tempting treats long before Halloween
by Beth Teitell

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

The conventions of Halloween demand that ordinary people - good people, calorie-fearing citizens - not only purchase, but take into their homes bags and bags of candy, fun-sized Milky Ways, individually wrapped Bit-O-Honeys, little Clark bars.

In earlier times, an unspoken agreement between the pushers and the users meant that Mr. Goodbar et al. didn't show up in stores until ``a reasonable'' time before Oct. 31. This was interpreted by attorneys for both parties to mean a period of ``not more than several weeks.''

But holiday creep, a plague that already has ruined the natural order of things, with trim-a-tree departments springing up during bathing suit season, has struck Halloween. This year, the Enemy started showing its face in late August.

The question we have to ask ourselves is why?

Before jumping to any negative conclusions, let's give the sellers the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe they offer Halloween candy early as a favor to the public, aware that as the big day approaches, pumpkin-carving and other pressures make it difficult for people to stop at a CVS on the way home from work and buy a 200-pack of Twix.

Maybe they're just being nice, trying to help us avoid the stress that comes from doing things at the last minute. After all, there's nothing worse than the Halloween equivalent of the April 15 midnight tax mail-off, namely, when you've waited too long to buy your candy, so that when you do go shopping, all that's left are the cheapo lollipops and the dreaded raisins.

I called Necco, and spoke with marketing manager Lory Zimbalatti. She denied that the precocious candy displays were a ploy to target the weak - ``Of course not,'' she said, ``we wouldn't want people to eat more candy'' - and explained that the candy makers and stores are merely taking advantage of a ``window of opportunity.''

``There is no seasonal candy out at the end of August,'' she said. And as we all know, nature - and Necco and M&M/Mars and Hershey - abhor a vacuum. And so another season has been added to the calendar: ``Back to school/Halloween.''

Do kids these days have it good or what? In my day, back-to-school shopping meant notebooks and pencils. Now it's Snickers.

Whatever the season-stretching excuse, the result is that those lacking willpower end up buying their ``Halloween'' candy five or 10 times over.

At what point do you have to admit to yourself that the serial bags of Three Musketeers aren't really for the neighborhood ghosts and ballerinas?

Perhaps it's when you no longer go through the show of putting the bars in the plastic pumpkin, and then eating them over a period of days, but rather break into the mother bag on the way home from the grocery store and hide the tiny wrappers from your spouse.

A few years ago, I learned the hard way (via a subtle but important weight gain) that the ``trick'' part of ``trick-or-treat'' has less to do with egging and toilet papering than with tricking oneself.

``You can't go out there and buy yourself a huge bag of Junior Mints,'' one woman told me. ``Adults aren't supposed to eat candy.''

But if she buys them for ``the children'' and then some are left over, what can she do? She has to eat them, just to get them out of the house.

In other words, the situation is out of - and into - her hands.