The first time I ever went out for Trick-or-Treat,  I was small, probably four or five. I don’t remember much about going door to door. I had a plastic mask that was hard to breathe through. It might have been Tweety Bird.

The next day I sat on our front porch and dumped out the candy in my pumpkin bucket. I separated everything into piles of: like, don’t like and don’t know if I like. I tried a roll of cute, round candies, small enough for the little people on something my Pop let me watch on TV, called Gulliver’s Travels. That was it. My pile of like had the few rolls added. I didn’t like licorice disks, hard butterscotch and candy corn.

My first leftovers from Halloween were lined up on the front fence, for sale. No one stopped to buy any of my sticky, kid-handled candy. I was disappointed, but soon forgot. I’m sure my mom threw away all the ones I didn’t want.

As I grew older, Halloween got more elaborate. I loved to Trick-or-Treat with my cousins. We got more and more creative with our costumes. We were always something that needed make-up, like a fairy or a beatnik. Once I was Peter Pan and Wendy was Tinkerbell. Our area for candy gathering got bigger. We started carrying pillow cases for our loot.

I traded away all kinds of goodies for Smarties. I separated them into colors. I liked purple and green best, and then pink, white, yellow and orange last.

Of all the candy in my various loot bags, the one that I still like best, even more than chocolate bars, is the cute Lilliputian size Smarties.