Candy Auction

Halloween is a holiday filled with ups and downs. The joy at seeing your favorite candy dropped in your bucket. The terror of a skeleton popping up behind some bushes. The confidence in your brand-new costume. The disappointment when your brother won’t make the trade you want.

Other than getting to dress up, my favorite part of Halloween growing up was trading and bartering my loot with my brother. Between the two of us, very little candy was set aside for our parents to enjoy. I preferred chocolate, he liked gummies. We could both agree that any candy with nuts, excluding Reese’s, should go to the parents. After all, we weren’t going to eat it, and they had driven us from house to house all night.

After sorting our individual buckets of candy and picking out the pieces neither of us wanted, we got straight to bartering. Personally, I made three piles: to be traded, could maybe be traded, and never trade. My “to be traded” pile usually consisted of candies I didn’t really want like Tootsie Rolls and bubblegum, which happened to be what my brother loved. The second pile that could be traded included candies like gold coins, Jolly Ranchers and lollipops, things I wouldn’t mind holding on to, but I could part with them if need be. My “never trade” pile was always orange, brown and blue-wrapped chocolates. I was not giving those up for anything.

Of course, with all that candy in front of us, we had to eat some. Wrappers got thrown into a fourth communal pile that we would pitch later. We knew better than to eat all of our candy at once as we needed bartering chips for later.

“I’ll give you two Tootsie Rolls for your Hershey’s,” I opened the floor for trading.

“Deal!” my brother swapped the candy and immediately untwisted the chocolate-flavored candy. “How about a Reese’s for the rest of your Tootsie Rolls?”

He was offering me a cheap deal. Even then, I knew that wasn’t fair. He had more candy that I wanted, and I couldn’t get it if I gave him all of my Tootsie Rolls now. I told him that was too steep, and he turned on businessman-mode.

“Reese’s are like gold! They even have a goldish color on the package! See?”

I wasn’t convinced, so I counter offered – ten tootsie rolls for three Reese’s and two Crunch. He took the deal.

After many rounds of haggling prices and swapping sugar, we quieted down and scooped our hard-earned candy back into our buckets. Although the whole process could have been as simple as “I don’t like this; do you want it?” we chose every year to barter our candy. This may have resulted in a much less even distribution of candy between us, but we both ended up happier with the results.

While I think I usually ended up with less candy than my brother, I always appreciated the quality of the candy I got. This trading system taught us how to have civilized disagreements with each other and that not everyone can get what they want. There’s a reason we both insisted on this tradition every single Halloween.

—Sara