I know a lot of people have a hate on for the Halloween treat bag but I love them and here is why. I love giving the little goblins a variety of treats, especially with the different ages and allergies you can encounter these days. When you're handing out 5 different things it takes way to much time to grab each item to give to each kid, especially if you get a good size herd at your door. With the treat bags I only have to grab one bag per kid and they are on their way in a flash. Another great reason for using treat bags, they make it seem like the kids are getting a lot of stuff, even if there are only a couple pieces of candy in it, and this greatly reduces the risk of your house being egged. Do kids still do that kind of stuff?
I usually leave buying my candy until as late as possible so John and I don't eat it all. So the other day Roman and I made a trip to Bulk Barn to pick up some delicious treats for the tick-or-treaters. I wanted to get a few different things so I knew Bulk Barn would be the best place to go since I could buy just enough to fill my treat bags, and not have boxes of candy laying around the house. Plus I could get a good variety of wrapped treats. I ended up getting Jolly Rancher suckers, caramel pumpkin balls, gumball eyes, peanut free chocolate spiders, and rockets. I had also picked up pencils, erasers, and boxes of stickers at Dollar Giant a month or so ago. For the littlest goblins that can't necessarily eat the candy, I picked up a bag of mini Playdoh containers at Wal Mart. I like to include some non-candy treats as well because I loved to get them as a kid. It was always fun to take your fancy new pencil to school the next day. Or maybe I was the only kid that had a love for school supplies at that age - a love that continues today!
I may also be the only person on the planet that actually enjoys assembling the treat bags. Last year Roman was nice enough to help me by sitting in his bouncy chair and swatting at a stuffed zebra for the 30 minutes that it took. We all know there is no way that he would sit still for that long now so when he went down for his nap I retreated to my craft room to assemble the bags. Speaking of the bags these little devils gave me a good amount of trouble. Granted I picked them up at Dollar Giant as well, and they were 40 for $1 so I shouldn't be surprised, but I had a heck of a time getting the tops to seal. After they started sealing the bags started pulling away from the zippers. Arg! Surprisingly after I made it through about 10 bags or so, both problems stopped and the bags worked like a charm. I was also pulling from the back of the package, so if you buy these bags I suggest starting at the front to save yourself the hassle. After the battle with the bags I decided to distress by testing out a caramel pumpkin and seeing what the stickers looked like. It's all about quality control people!
I ended up with a few different versions of my original treat bag because I ran out of different things at different times. As I ran out of things I tried to keep the value of the treat bags close to the same by adding more of another item and surprisingly I was pretty close on all of them! Below are the contents of the different bags along with the cost of each bag.
Now you might be thinking that 70-79 cents per kid seems a little steep. So, I made a trip to Wal Mart to see what the cost per mini chocolate bar worked out to be since they are the most common Halloween treat. They had two different options at my Wal Mart; $6.50 for 50 bars (13 cents per bar) or $15 for 90 bars (17 cents per bar). From my experience most people usually give out 3-4 bars per kid so that works out to 39-68 cents per goblin. For an extra 10 cents you look like the coolest house on the block, and your chance of being egged is drastically reduced! The Playdoh worked out to 42 cents each which when added to a treat bag is a little pricey but those little guys are so cute I don't mind spending the extra money!
What was/is your favorite or most memorable Halloween treat? When I was little there was an old retired prison guard that handed out apples every year. All of us kids got so excited when we got an apple from Walter. Luckily we lived in an extremely small town and we could actually eat the apple because everyone knew it came from Walter!
I also love treat bags! And Halloween! Leila didn't get to go out last year but she was just as happy to help hand out candy and wave at all the "kids" from the front living took window! If we didn't get over $100 kids I'd still do treat bags but that adds up. (I like how you broke down the cost of each bag!!). One of the "moms" of our friends handed out a can of pop. I remember being super excited!! The odd pencil was way cool too! (I also love you're handing out pencils and play doh!).
ReplyDeleteMom usually hands out pop and chips. We used to get so many cans of PPP as kids that we had to go home half way through to empty out pillow cases!
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