Like most kids, ours absolutely love Halloween. They love carving jack-o-lanterns, they love dressing up and trick or treating, and they LOVE candy. As a constantly-anxious parent of food-allergic children, I planned in advance how I would handle the food at their parties as well as any they received as a reward for their door-to-door begging. For my pre-school child, I had a difficult time communicating with the parent who signed up to bring treats. All communication was done through the A.M. teacher. Even though I only needed to know what the parent was bringing so that I could prepare something similar for my child, there was too much back and forth. The lesson learned is that I need to have direct contact with anyone who is providing food.
Trick or treating was a different ball of wax (or whatever a chocolate-covered nut equivalent to a ball of wax would be.) One idea we had heard of was to have the children bring home all the candy they got, then set out the ones that they couldn't have for the Nut Fairy to take and replace with some other goodie. This sounded like too much work to me and more than slightly implausible - kind of degrading to the other fairies. My alternative was to buy more than enough safe candy for us to hand out, then use the extra to swap with my children. That way, they wouldn't feel like they had to give anything up. Thank goodness they're not allergic to sugar!
I explained the plan to the kids before we headed out into the neighborhood and they seemed to get it. We also set the rule that no food was to be eaten until we got home. As a further precaution, I took the epipen with us. As soon as we got to the first door, however, the candy-swap plan went out the window. Quite reasonably, the kids looked through the candy distributor’s selection to tell them what they could have. On what seemed to be several occasions, I heard my son say “I can’t have that.” Then he turned and walked away. The first few times this happened, I told him to just take what was offered and reminded him that we would swap it out when we got home. He said, “No.”
I worried that as the night went on, he would get angrier at his allergies and feel more and more rejected. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to bother him. He just ran turned away from the door and ran on to the next one. I guess the thrill of dressing as a cowboy and going around the neighborhood at night surrounded by vampires, princesses, and superheroes was more important than the candy. For that, I am grateful.
As for my 8-year-old daughter, her only concern was peanuts. When she didn’t have an alternative, she took the nut candy and later traded it with a friend that went with us.
Two weeks later, the cowboy and the witch are still working on the candy they did get. My hope is that their memories will be of dressing up, parading, and running around with their friends and not of the food that they couldn’t have.
