Overanxious Parents Have Almost Killed the Best Part of Halloween. There’s Still Time to Save It.

Food Resurrect the Popcorn Ball! Halloween candy has gotten bland and boring. But there’s an old trick that can make it a treat once again. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Tripper Allen and Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It was a dark and stormy night in the ’90s, and while I was unhelpfully glued to The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, my mother would be scooping hot, gooey caramel popcorn from a giant metal bowl and assembling it into perfect spheres on parchment paper. Soon, the blobs would be wrapped in cellophane and handed out to trick-or-treating children on Halloween. While modern audiences might assume that those orbs came vaulting back at our house, smashing windows and leaving dents in the garage door—or were just thrown out by paranoid parents en masse—they were actually accepted and eaten, and I have it on good authority that kids in the neighborhood looked forward to them. Try that today in most cities, and you’ll be on a watch list in no time. The idea of parents letting their child consume a random stranger’s sweets wrapped in plastic is as foreign an idea as letting them play with lawn darts. Which is a shame, because while mythological razor-smuggling candy apples may never make a comeback, homemade Halloween treats are far more fun than that sack of warped Tootsie Rolls and discount inch-long CVS candy bars. And moreover, in the hands of sugar alchemists nationwide, it turns out they’ve really come a long way. Some are so creatively creepy these days that they could easily double as decorations. There were basically three types of homemade Halloween goodies growing up: the aforementioned gooey balls, haystacks, and brownies and cookies, often with googly eyes appended. And of course they’re still going strong at your rustic fall fairs. But these days some bakers are breaching the uncanny valley of scary-looking snacks with offerings like eyeball Jell-O cups, graveyard brownies, Dracula denture cookie sandwiches, cupcakes with floating ghosts atop, bloody Band-Aid wafers, and green-witch finger cookies. If I were drunk and tired enough, I’d probably confuse the fingers for the real thing. “My littlest would not touch these with a 10-foot pole,” says Steph Loaiza, cookbook author and co-founder of Six Sisters’ Stuff, who got her witch-finger recipe from her mother. “They would 100 percent believe those are witch fingers. ‘How did you get these? This is an abomination, I’m not touching them.’ ” Heather Lynne, a teacher and baker, gets similar reactions. Over at her site, Hezzi-D’s Recipe Box, you’ll find coffin-shaped Pop-Tarts, brain cupcakes with moscato wine-filled plastic syringes (clearly not meant for kids, but you can always substitute juice), and raw mummy meat—in this case red-velvet Rice Krispies Treats wrapped in plastic, like something you’d find at a haunted deli. While she doesn’t hand them out to random trick-or-treaters (there are hundreds in her neighborhood every year), she does give them to families she knows. And her students benefit too. “I did take them to school with me, and the kids freaked out! They absolutely loved them and were grossed out,” she says. “As for myself, I love making a giant coffin to put on top of a cake or sugar glass shards to put on top of cupcakes.” Of course, most elaborate sweets like these are not being handed to random kids. First off, they’d never survive intact, being jostled around in that cutthroat bag otherwise filled with hard-edged candy bars that would elbow them into a smattering of crumbs. But we all know that’s not the main reason. Fears of allergies and stranger danger still abound. Homemade confections are more likely to make appearances at Halloween events with crowd control, like house parties, bake sales, classroom workshops for kids, and local trunk-or-treating nights, which are like traditional T-or-T with Google SafeSearch activated. In other words, the homemade trade is ongoing among close-knit communities where everybody knows your name. Other places, not so much. I think most of us are familiar with the founding myths of the Great Orange Scare. There was that old news story about the cyanide-laced Pixy Stix, the rumors of those razor blades in apples, and for all we know, some troublemaker strapped a single chocolate chip atop a nuclear warhead and passed it off as an éclair. It certainly didn’t help when, a few days before Halloween in 1970, the New York Times published an article telling readers: “That plump red apple … may have a razor blade hidden inside … the bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye, the popcorn balls may be coated with camphor, the candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills.” Jesus. It’s now known that almost all of these stories were hoaxes—unmasked in the mid-’80s after University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best debunked much of the hysteria around maniacs poisoning kids en masse via homemade treats. Yes, in 1959 a California dentist did distribute 450 candy-coated laxative tablets, temporarily injuring 30 kids. (As if we needed another reason to fear dentists.) And, granted, an 8-year-old did tragically die from cyanide-laced Pixy Stix in 1974. But this latter tragedy wasn’t stranger danger—it was premeditated-murder-from-his-own-father danger; the father took out a life insurance policy on his son and tried to make it look as if the death had been the result of random Halloween sadism. He was executed in 1984, but the idea unfortunately lived on, and in most places, we gradually shifted away from homemade sweets to prepackaged candy from known brands. The question is: Cui bono? Who benefits? It’s tempting to sound like Donald Sutherland in JFK and argue that candy companies were pushing these myths to sell their own goods instead. Was Hershey training candy tamperers, CIA-style, to disrupt the homespun-popcorn-ball hegemony? Not exactly. “Prepackaged candy really got going in the ’50s, when it was advertised as a way to save Mom from having to spend her day making popcorn balls and doughnuts,” says Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. “Stranger danger didn’t become a thing until the 1970s.” Candy companies have certainly made millions by ultimately dominating every Halloween bag in America. But deep down, many parents secretly loved the tainted homemade-treat frenzy, because it meant they no longer had to make them. Halloween is already exhausting enough with decorations and taking the kids out and the doorbell ringing every 37 seconds. Who has time to make enough brownies to feed a barracks on top of it? Little is more aggravating than that one parent on the street who goes all out with homemade treats and makes you look bad. Now that it’s all allegedly laced with napalm, parents throughout the block can lay down their spatulas and just drink some spiked pumpkin cider instead. So one wonders: In an era of Uber Eats and allergies and ongoing paranoia, can dishing out homemade treats ever truly make a comeback outside small communities? Some parents try to earnestly assuage the fears by labeling their fresh-baked cookies with an ingredient list and contact info. That’s an idea one person floated on Reddit recently, before being clued in that unless everyone knew each other, the labels would be thrown right out with the cookies. They opted for Rice Krispies Treats and Cheez-It packs instead. But I have another idea. Get the damn kids to bake the stuff. Companies like I’m the Chef Too! and Baketivity sell kid-friendly baking kits with numerous Halloween-themed treats, and it’s about time they did their part anyway. A cookie from a random adult can inspire paranoid fantasies, but a cookie made by a kid? What kind of monster would turn that down? Are you going to hurt little Johnny’s feelings by throwing away his deformed snickerdoodle? No. As for me, I’m going to do my part this year to bring the homemade tradition back by giving trick-or-treaters with their parents two options: You can take a delicious homemade popcorn ball I made myself or these prepackaged candy cigarettes. Your call. Cooking Food Halloween Holidays Kids