The Candy Chart

Every October I turn into a general. Not a fun general, not a parade general, a real one, the kind who stands over a card table at two in the morning studying terrain like it’s Normandy. Except my terrain is a bowl of fun-size Snickers and my enemy is a bunch of seven-year-olds in dinosaur costumes. It all starts with the candy chart. I don’t just buy candy, I commission it, I rank it, I give it a seating assignment better than my own sister got at my daughter’s wedding.

People think Halloween is about costumes. Folks, Halloween is about logistics. You’ve got sixty-two minutes of peak traffic, a doorbell that may or may not work, and a dog that loses his mind every time a six-year-old dressed as a taco rings it. You need a system. You need color codes. You need, and I cannot stress this enough, laminate.

My Candy Chart Has More Rules Than the IRS

I am not exaggerating when I tell you my candy chart has subsections. Full-size bars go to kids who clearly walked from another zip code. Fun-size goes to the regulars. And there’s a special, secret tier, hidden at the bottom of the chart, for any kid who says ‘thank you’ and makes eye contact, because manners should be rewarded like it’s a 401k match. My wife says I’m overthinking a bowl of candy. I say Rome wasn’t built by people who ‘winged it’ on October 31st.

I spent four hours laminating this thing. Four hours! You know what else takes four hours? A root canal, a Thanksgiving turkey, and apparently, according to my doctor, ‘calming down.’ But I don’t calm down, not in candy season. I color-coded the chart by bar type, then I cross-referenced it with a loose, informal survey I took of the neighborhood kids last year about their favorite candy, which is a very normal thing for a grown man to do on a Tuesday.

The Candy Chart Did Not Account for Me

Here’s the part nobody puts in the parenting books. The candy chart assumes the only threat to the candy supply is the children. Nobody warns you about the dad standing on his own porch at six-fifteen, chart in hand, telling himself, ‘I’ll just have one, to test quality control.’ One turned into three. Three turned into ‘well, I already opened the bag, can’t put it back.’ By the time the porch light clicked on, I had personally trick-or-treated my own house into bankruptcy.

I want to be clear, I did not eat the candy because I lack discipline. I ate the candy because the chart told me the bars were ranked by quality, and as the chart’s creator, I felt a professional obligation to verify my own data. That’s not a sweet tooth, folks, that’s quality assurance. Somebody’s got to make sure the Twix is still good. It’s a sacrifice. A lonely, chocolate-covered sacrifice.

What My Candy Chart Taught Me About Life

You spend all this time planning. You laminate, you rank, you color-code, and then life shows up at 7pm and there’s no kids, no candy, and a woman named Gina standing behind you with her arms crossed stating facts like she’s reading me my rights. ‘The chart’s perfect. The candy’s gone, George.’ That’s not a punchline, folks, that’s a eulogy for a Snickers bar.

I’ve since made some adjustments for next year. New rule: the candy chart gets locked in a safe. Combination known only to my wife, my accountant, and a notary. I’m not saying I don’t trust myself around chocolate, I’m saying I’ve seen the evidence, and the evidence has wrapper residue on it.

At the end of the day, I don’t regret the candy chart. I regret nothing except maybe eating the good stuff before a single kid in a dinosaur costume ever rang my bell. Next Halloween, there will be a new chart, a sturdier chart, a chart with a padlock and a witness. Because a man can plan the perfect operation down to the laminate, and still lose the whole war to himself standing alone on his own porch at six-fifteen, mid-Twix, fully defeated.

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Choice1-3D books: browse all three series on our Choice1-3D Bookshelf — Heritage Hollow Adventures (kids mystery series), Amelia Shade’s Guide to Surviving… (dry humor for grown-ups) and Dusty Shepherd (the hidden meaning of numbers in the Bible).