My kids have outgrown treats. I didn’t expect to miss it.

The saying “The days are long but the years are short” is never more true than when I look back on Halloween past. Before I was a mom, I used to sit on the porch handing out candy to the neighborhood kids, often alone because my Navy husband was deployed.

I was going “oohs” and “ahhs” over the cute costumes and encouraging tired parents to hang on – as if I had any idea what it took to stuff a toddler into an ill-fitting, itchy costume (one they wanted to wear!) or deal with a cranky preschooler who was up two hours after bedtime while bouncing around the house in a sugar rush.

Then I discovered.

Halloween with little kids is fun – and exhausting

Once we had two kids, Halloween became this big, exciting holiday that somehow seemed to be more for me than for them – and yet it was still completely exhausting. My oldest son was only 10 months old on his first Halloween and I think he wore his Tigger costume for maybe an hour before he got tired of the holiday.

The following year, he was excited to wear his lion costume and go trick-or-treating with his 8-week-old baby brother dressed in polka dots. It was very early for all of us, but they were lovely. Of course, my husband and I claimed most of the candy (the “candy tax,” as we called it) because they were too young to enjoy it.

By the time they started school, candy hunting had reached mythical proportions. They dreamed of bags of candy so big they couldn’t carry them home. Of course, even though they were full of energy and wanted to walk as far as they could, their little legs didn’t quite live up to expectations. My husband would end up wearing one or both while I collected various costume pieces that had fallen off or gotten too hot, as well as their heavy bags of candy.

The middle years were the sweet spot

For me, the sweet spot of the trick-or-treating years was when my kids were old enough to pick out their own costumes and have two hours of trick-or-treating without melting or asking to be taken home. Sure, the costumes weren’t as cute as when they were younger (like the year they were characters in a video game they were too young to play), but they had a great time picking them out and happily fooling around with them for as long as we let them. (Which usually meant I was the one begging to be carried.)

My favorite years were the ones when their costumes and the weather aligned – neither too heavy when it was unusually hot, nor too light when it was cold or rainy. Gone are the days of puppies and kittens, lions and tigers; now they wanted to be characters from Star Wars and Minecraft. And they understood our candy-stealing habits, declaring loud and clear that the candy tax was deeply unfair.

Now they’re teenagers and they don’t want anything to do with tradition

The pandemic stole a Halloween from us, and in 2021, my oldest son was almost 12 and had lost interest in candy, while my youngest was 10 and excited to play the character everyone said he looked like – Harry Potter. Since then, he has continued to be excited about Halloween, although his interest in formal costumes faded, DIYing whatever he could find around the house.

One year he was a candidate for The Great British Pastry (an apron, a loaf of bread, flour in your hair). Another year he became a Starbucks barista (a Starbucks hat, apron and cup, helmet). But now he has decided that he too is done with the deceptions.

For the first time in 15 years, I will be handing out candy instead of following my own costumed children as they run around the neighborhood collecting treats. It will be a bittersweet night – and yes, I plan to eat my feelings in fun candy bars. Because trick or treat is one of those childhood traditions that ends way too soon. Like getting up at dawn to open Christmas presents or hiding a hundred Easter eggs in the yard, it can sometimes seem like more work than fun.

When everything is gone – when the last costume has been worn, when the teenagers sleep later than me on Christmas morning, when the Easter eggs are stored in a box in the back of the closet – all we are left with are the memories and the photos. And I’m not ready to be done with them, even if they are.

But who knows, maybe in exchange for a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, I can lure my teenagers out onto the porch to pass out candy with me and reminisce about their favorite Halloweens. After all, paying the candy tax has always been part of the deal – and this year, I’m more than happy to pay it to spend a little more time with them.