Halloween is a public spectacle, but preparations for it often go on for weeks beforehand behind the scenes. Families and groups of friends make costumes and prepare displays and haunted houses. Bars and restaurants gear up for parties.
But an increasingly public part of getting ready for Halloween is the distribution of sweets to homes in neighborhoods that get a high volume of trick-or-treating children.
“We start collecting candy around the beginning of the month,” Kira Campbell, a South Strafford resident who’s in her last year of overseeing the collection and redistribution of candy in Strafford.
The PTA sets up a drop box at Strafford General Store (fka Coburns). “I feel like I’ve done pretty well if there are three giant bins” at her house a few days before Halloween, she said.
In towns like Strafford, where a couple of small, walkable villages get flooded with tiny wizards, witches, superheroes and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs from surrounding communities, the candy collection is a recognition of the homes in town that bear the brunt of Halloween traffic, a gesture of thanks from residents of outlying areas that can seem particularly cold and dark on Oct. 31.
In addition to Strafford, villages in Norwich, Woodstock, Lyme, Cornish and Grantham encourage candy donations to offset the burden for residents who see the most trick-or-treaters. The prospect of walkable streets, often with no traffic, has made these communities magnets for families from surrounding communities.
Some of those efforts are more robust than others. Woodstock regionalizes the effort, going so far as setting up collection points at schools in surrounding towns that also are part of the Mountain Views Supervisory Union.
Meanwhile, Lyme gathers donations at the town’s Converse Free Library.
Candy by the bushel
For the most part, what the candy collections allow — the swarming of certain neighborhoods — is part of the charm of small-town New England. But in some corners, the influx of empty calories, and hordes of children, can seem overwhelming.
In Norwich, for example, homes in the most walkable parts of the village can get 500 to 1,000 trick-or-treaters in an evening, said Molly Gentine, who coordinates candy collection as part of her PTO duties.
In addition to families from rural Norwich, children come in from other towns, sometimes with a parent who grew up in Norwich and moved to another zip code.
“You bring your kids back because it’s part of the tradition,” Gentine said.
Candy collection is consistent from year to year, yielding enough to give 100 pieces of candy to each of the 115 homes on eight village streets that see the most costumed children.
“I have a spreadsheet,” Gentine said. (That’s 11,500 pieces of donated candy, for those keeping score.)
Woodstock does more than collect candy. Both both the town and the village appropriate $750 apiece to buy candy for homes on High Street, Golf Avenue and Maple Street, Seton McIlroy, chairwoman of the Village Trustees, said in an interview.
Those three streets form a neighborhood off Central Street that the village police close to vehicles for trick-or-treating. Families or groups of children can walk from there to the Woodstock Inn, which also welcomes trick-or-treaters.
The rest of Woodstock Village is available for trick-or-treating, but pickins might be slim. A little over half of the housing in Woodstock is owned by part-time residents, McIlroy said, so even the homes around the green and on River Street are often dark between foliage and ski seasons.
On the closed streets, “you just don’t have to worry about safety,” McIlroy said.
The crowds aren’t for everyone, though. Candy is cheap, until you’re buying it by the bushel.
In Norwich, people who opt out of Halloween pass their candy on to their neighbors, Gentine said.
“It’s a lot to ask,” she said, “and if you’re not into it, that’s OK.”
Even the town appropriation and candy collection in Woodstock cover only a fraction of what a home gives out.
“It’s amazing how not a lot of candy $1,500 is when you look at it,” McIlroy said.
Uneven burden
State Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Woodstock, who has lived on Golf Avenue for the past 34 years, said in a phone interview that she’d just bought the first installment of what she’d need for Halloween: 29 bags of candy, on sale for $119.21. That was only around 420 pieces, not enough for the 600 or so children who come by her house, which is up a slight hill that deters some of the neighborhood visitors.
“It’s always been a busy place,” Clarkson said. “It’s now a designated place.”
The crowds can be “a crush,” she said. The children come by in such numbers that it’s hard for a resident passing out candy to take a moment and admire each costume.
And, “not everyone is so happy spending 150 bucks on candy,” she added. With more part-time residents “the burden falls on the full-time people who are getting fewer and fewer and older and older.”
Ann Marie Boyd, who has lived on High Street for 36 years, said it’s always been a busy place for trick-or-treating, but it’s been busier in recent years now that kids don’t roam all over the village. The candy that’s collected and purchased by the village doesn’t stretch very far, Boyd said.
A network of friends in town who brought their children to the neighborhood over the years brings bags of candy right to Boyd’s house, she said.
“The excess that we get, we give to other neighbors,” she said. “I’m not buying any candy.”
Some High Street residents pack it in on Halloween. Boyd says she often runs out of candy by 7 and has to shut the light off and retreat indoors.
“When we have 1,000 trick-or-treaters and the elementary school has maybe 300 kids in it, I think maybe it’s losing some of that community spirit,” Boyd said.
Even so, Boyd and her husband have long set up a haunted cemetery in their side yard, weather permitting. And other households, particularly those with children, really get into it, with music, light shows and food, Clarkson said. It’s a social event for parents, too.
“I moved here from Pittsfield (Vt.) and there was no trick-or-treating,” Cindy Metzler, a High Street resident of 24 years, said in an interview.
“It was surprising,” she said of that first Halloween in Woodstock. “And at the beginning I thought, ‘Oh, this is awesome,'” but by the end of the evening, she was exhausted. “I’ve gotten used to it, and now I have no trouble turning off the light,” she said.
She and her immediate neighbors gather to hand out candy, pooling their resources. She buys some candy, but not tons.
“I know people that don’t like it,” she said. “They just go out to dinner for the night.”
Community celebration
But others in the most concentrated Halloween trick-or-treating sites said they are joyous places. The hectic energy is part of the deal, like passing weather.
Lyme seems to have created a system that works. Every Oct. 31, around 300 trick-or-treaters descend on the village to visit homes on the common, Union Street, Market Street and East Thetford Road. The police and fire departments block off the common to vehicle traffic.
Arielle Baker, who took over coordinating candy collection this year from Eleanor Shafer, her next-door neighbor on the common, said she’d long wanted to live in a place that had a busy Halloween.
Baker grew up in rural Colorado, where houses were few and far between, and where it was often so cold that she dressed up as a skier each year, just to stay warm.
About 30 homes in the village receive collected candy, which families from outlying parts of town can drop off at the school or the library.
“Even with the candy collection, you need to supplement,” Shafer said, in an interview, though the numbers are more manageable than in larger towns like Norwich and Woodstock.
Sitting next to Shafer, Baker said the candy purchases are “a small price to pay for the small-town charm and experience.”
Pretty much every child who attends the Lyme School comes to the green, and a few others come in from neighboring parts of Orford, Fairlee and Thetford, Baker said. It’s not quite a zoo, but once a resident is out on their porch for the evening, they’re out there for the duration, she added.
“I dreamed of landing in a home that would have something like this,” Baker said.
“The point is,” said Shafer, who’s lived in Lyme for 11 years, “that we’re here to make this a safe thing for the community.”
