Strange things given as a Halloween treat?

When i was growing up someone gave out a plastic baggie with 5 cents worth of pennies in it. My son got a pencil this year.

Pleasant Plains mentioned a "spooky" eraser.

I hear razors are kind of popular...

My daughter got a teeny tiny deck of cards...around Barbie sized.

Someone gave us tampons once when I was about seven. My parents refused to explain what they were.

WTF!

When I was really little, we used to T-o-T near my grandparents' house so they could see our costumes, and a woman around the corner used to give out...silver dollars? Or something that wasn't minted anymore, can't quite remember. I guess she had put away a whole bunch of them before they went out of production.

Would T-o-T for a piece o' eight or a dubloon

woman at work gave out beef jerky. hick.

My dad ran out of candy one year and started giving out this homemade deer jerky he made (none of us liked it because it had wayyyy too much liquid smoke). The next year we got a few Pavloved out kids asking for jerky. They were disappointed we had none.

imo if you give out anything but candy bars, you're doing it wrong. Toothbrushes, fruits, tootsie rolls, they all suck.

I was all O_o for a moment because I didn't know what 'liquid smoke' was. Of course it's water that smoke has been passed through, used as a flavouring. But I thought for a second that you were passing out jerky soaked in amyl nitrate.

http://www.peppers.com/cube/images/uploads/z31.jpg

The worst flavoring ever invented!

ANd when you describe its creation process it makes it sound like bongwater.

do people still give out smarties? hated those things.

pennies.

Some dickhead gave out toothbrushes in our neighborhood this year.

a 4 year old told me yesterday that smarties were his fave halloween candy. i was like, gtfo.

bags of pennies and pencils i remember from when i was a kid. sucked. and dentists giving out toothbrushes or dental floss, inevitably with the name of their practice stamped on. nothing particularly bizarre though. main enemy was grandma candy, like popcorn balls, cookies, candy apples. anything that did not come in colorful manufactured packaging. shit went right into a bush. probably had hair in it.

popcorn balls are delicious.

they probably are, but as a young man, i was terrified of old hairs

Chick comics

ha, just about to post that. a bible belt classic!

I got raw pinto beans once :(

A bunch of Lisa Frank pencils. Some woman gave me a whole bundle but I never used the things because the erasers were too heavy.
I never got to experience the hilarity of Chick Tracts, however.

I, too, never cared for home made popcorn balls and candy apples were more of a fair season thing and I was sick of them by the time Halloween rolled around. The prized candies for me were the Fun Sized Skittles and M&Ms while the candy bars were good for a sugar rush while playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on the weekends.

I once took my little brother out trick or treating, and at some point in the evening a box of matches landed in his bag. Even weirder, the box was monogrammed.

worst ever = miniature booklets w/ the good news about JC.

those people got egged.

Not a "thing" given, but in third grade when I was trick-or-treating for UNICEF, someone told me that they were against the organization for political reasons. I thought that was a weird bit of political philosophy, and still do.

do they give monkey nuts in america? i don't know what they are called in the usa, but basically only for halloween, ever, in ireland, everyone buys these fucking nuts and you'd have hundreds of them at the end of the night, as well as like, nice stuff.

http://www.foodforbirds.co.uk/admin/uploads/dde405bc82784c728f52215565e9a3ba.jpg

the weird thing is, i don't know any kid that actually liked them. me and my brother used to have a monkey nut war each halloween, our beds were at opposite sides of the room and we'd just fling monkey nuts back and forth until they were all broken and all over the floor.

i never got anything too crazy, i think i remember a dutch family on our street who always gave you weird traditional dutch stuff, and fruit was always pretty shit and actually kinda wasteful, like most kids in my area prob were well looked after enough that they eat fruit. just let them have a sugar binge for one night a year.

it's quite weird as i don't know if the tradition has died out completely but when i last lived in my parent's house i can remember my mum buying loads of m&ms and mini mars bars and stuff and for 2 or maybe 3 years practically nobody called. and so we had to eat them all ourselves, was quite sick of m&ms by the end.

did you guys have this one family home which everybody egged or threw fireworks at? on our street there was this big corner house owned by the te*hans, i think the dad was like assistant to the prime minister or some big civil service job, but basically from generation to generation people knew that mary, his wife, would chase you through the park, drive after you in her car, call the police, just endless amazing fun stuff that makes you want to target their house.

i can remember one time when myself and some friends were like 19 and really stoned, old enough to not be doing this, we egged te*hans just as one last hurrah, and it was fucking amazing, she drove/ran around after us for ages, we were like running through hedges and stuff and then we got back to my friend's house and were sitting in his front room trying to see her when BOOM, a car revved up and shone full headlights on us through the windows!

people all over the town would flock to te*hans on halloween, having heard of poor mary, who prob never realised that if she had just not fucking bothered chasing someone for ringing her doorbell and running away back in 1981, none of this would ever have happened. she also never got parents involved even when she knew who it was...prob cos she'd have to admit her crazy behaviour.

Ronan, in America, those are called goober peas.

thanks a lot for that useful info.

• "Spooky" erasers.

• Pretzels, straight out of the bag.

• Icy cans of Coca-Cola.

• Stickers.

• Eisenhower dollars.

• Snack bags of chips. At least they were in the packaging unlike the pretzels.

Albertson's sold these donut coupon books and if you bought one, you got a dozen donuts yourself. So my parents eventually started giving out the Albertson's coupons good for one free donut. I got a few as a kid and I always hated them. First, Halloween should be about instant gratification: you shouldn't have to wait until your parents go grocery shopping to get your stuff. Second, I've always hated donuts.

monkey nuts? goober peas? aren't those peanuts?

HATE DONUTS? TRAVESTY.

I used to get McDonald's coupons too.

"HATE DONUTS?"
not into white power bands, but would be into this one.

monkey nuts = peanuts
goober peas = boiled peanuts

HEY NO MORE RHYMES NOW I MEAN IT.

Oh, I had no idea that "goober peas" referred explicitly to boiled peanuts.

(xp) I mash wack MCs / like goober peas

I don't know nothing about no goober peas. Peanuts in shell, peanuts out of shell = PEANUTS.

exactly.

yes, it's not like they're a mysterious kind of nut

right i never actually even realised they were just peanuts, tho prob haven't seen one in the shell like that in 20 years.

really? odd.

xxp Actually, I do believe you'll find they're a bean.

well yeah but is just a PEANUT!

i'm going to have to have a long hard think about my outlook on life in light of this

if you went to a baseball game here and asked for a monkey nut they'd think you were crazy. or into tonguing monkeys balls.

Unless it was an Angels game, then it'd be ALL RIGHT GIMMEE HIGH FIVE.

you don't eat monkey's balls at sports games over there?

(i would always call peanuts peanuts just never really encountered them in their shells except at halloween, when weirdly everyone called them monkey nuts, i don't know if this is just ireland or if it's britain as well, they don't celebrate halloween as much cos they have a bigger festival of fireworks etc close by where the nation remembers a brilliant time they killed a catholic.)