Welcome to Cult Answers, a column where Cultsploitation answers all your (read: Google’s) burning questions about various topics, often with snarky responses tied to horror and cult films! Our first question comes from a Googler who is apparently struggling with the economic weight of the Halloween season on their shoulders:
How much Halloween candy to buy?
Dear reader, this question is a bit of a conundrum because of the vagaries within it. When you say how much, what kind of measurement system are we talking? Are we referencing candy in pounds? Buckets? Bags? Boxes? It’s difficult to determine with any certainty a specific poundage or unit for your candy-giving needs, but one thing’s for sure: you don’t want to be the one house on the block that turns the lights off early. That, my friends, is grounds for The Adventures of Pete and Pete level mischief.
So let’s turn to some Halloween films and TV shows to help us gauge the candy appetites of trick-or-treaters. Note: they’re voracious. Just look at this episode of Bob’s Burgers, wherein a trusting neighbor leaves a bucket of candy unattended on their porch for the little ones:
Thus, we assume that you will be guarding your Halloween candy with your life. Let’s take a look at some trick-or-treaters from Halloween 3: Season of the Witch to get an understanding of how big a bag most kids carry:
Are they actually brownbagging it?! Whatever the case, it looks pretty big, and we can see that the gas station attendant clearly does not have enough candy to go around. However, you probably also don’t want to go to the lengths of this neighbor in the film Big Daddy:
Unfortunately none of these really help us figure out exactly how much Halloween candy to buy. So we do have to do a little math to figure this out. Don’t worry – it’s not as difficult as you might be thinking.
Think about how many kids were in the most recent graduating high school class in your area. Multiply that by 7 – we’re counting kindergarten through sixth grade as part of our trick-or-treating masses. That’s an approximate number of kids that could possibly come trick-or-treating at your house. Let’s divide that by 4 – probably a quarter won’t show up at your house.
Now, multiply that number by 3 – we’re giving each kid three pieces of candy, no more no less. Now each Halloween bag of candy has approximately 150 pieces, give or take some. Divide your number of kids with three pieces of candy by 150, and you have approximately the number of bags you’d need for trick-or-treat.
Hopefully that answers how much Halloween candy to buy, but if it doesn’t you could always just give out small handfuls of candy corn and be known as the worst candy house in the area.
