Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Last year I left BF in charge of the candy-buying...we live on a dead-end street off a big main intersection, so obviously we never get many trick-or-treaters and...he apparently decided to buy a jumbo bag of every candy bar he loves. We lived off the leftovers for weeks, not that I complained :)

I always give out stuff I love, in case I'm left with leftovers, and who wants to be the lame house giving out tootsie rolls?

Our neighborhood is a trick-or-treaters' bonanza. There are over 50 kids living here, and then kids from other neighborhoods come here to score the big loot. We always have a big Halloween party, and it is a blast!
As for candy, my son is allergic to peanuts, so I buy the kind of candy I'd want him to have (I can swap out the stuff he can't have with our left-overs.) Unfortunately for the adult, chocolate-lovers in the house, our candy selection is usually pure sugar: Sweet-Tarts, Airheads, Tootsie Rolls, bubble gum, etc. Kids love it, but I am not at all tempted by it.
Pre-allergy awareness it was all Almond Joys and Snickers for me!

Haha love these questions.

I definitely give out candy I like, because I feel like if I hate it, they might hate it too. We try to overbuy but year to year, the crop of kids fluctuates and you never can tell what is too much and what is not enough.

Hillary
Chew on That

We live in the country so have no one to buy for, but that doesn't stop me from doing it anyway! There is one neighborhood where a co-worker lives where about everyone in town goes to trick or treat. She has had as many as 1200 kids come to her door.

csbrown--I adored getting non-candy things as well as candy things--I loved getting Halloween pencils, little miniature black cats, stickers--anything but the dread spider rings, actually. I also agree with the non-candy things--if I didn't want to get a reputation as the 'crazy razor blade lady' I would love to give homemade stuff. As a kid the Halloween treats I loved the best, even more than candy, were baked goods made with candy, like cupcakes and brownies topped with carmel corn and little plastic cats, witches and pumpkins.

I usually make up little baskets every year, with one chocolate, one 'nasty sugary kid thing' (ie sour patch gummis or Jolly Ranchers which kids seem to love for some odd reason) and one favorite nostalgic chocolate thing with nuts. I ask if someone has an allergy, so I can 'rearrange.'

As for what I like, most of the stuff I really crave is too expensive and dark to give out to kids, which is good I guess. I do like PB cups, Butterfingers, and Reeces Pieces though in small doses, so I give out those, eat a few, then take the rest to work.

I tend to underbuy though because I don't trust myself with chocolate QUITE as much as I like to admit...

Recently we've had a lot of new families move onto the block, so hopefully there will actually be kids to give candy to.

I've usually bought candy that I personally would like getting (chocolate) and I usually don't buy more than three bags because really, there weren't a lot of takers. Hopefully this year is different.

I always made my costume. it was always crappy and hilarious. also, I always used a pillowcase for a candy vessel. We would fill them all the way up, sometimes even went back out to get another half- a -pillowcase.
the other kids gave us crap for not having little pumpkin bucket things, and store bought movie themed costumes, but i know we had more fun. We were allowed to go by ourselves, it was the coolest thing ever.

Here is my costume from third grade:http://artninja.deviantart.com/art/the-quot-stupid-horse-quot-29577008

(you can see why I got crap from the starwars costume kids :) )

now, i live somewhere else and my neighborhood does a wierd hayride thing with all the kids in the neighborhood trick or treating at once...
since none of them are that little, and only half of them were costumes (so depressing!) one year i hid under the portch and soaked them all with the hose when they came to the house....haha ohhh highschool.

@Heart--my son still has a spider ring from two years ago. He loves that thing.

I'm with a lot of you. I buy candy I like so if there's any left, I don't mind eating it. Love the fun-sized milky way bars. Of course, I usually end up stashing a bag in the freezer because otherwise there won't be any left. People bus kids in by the vanload to our neighborhood. Not that I have a problem with that. Our neighborhood is clean and low-traffic, and we get some adorable little princesses and Buzz Lightyears.

Even though we bought sweets every year, I ended up enjoying them for the next several months, as we used to live on a very busy street with very few kids around. So I would just usually buy the sweets I fancy since I knew I would wind up having to take care of them. We overbought by definition, as you can imagine, since even buying one chocolate bar would amount to overbuying.

This year, however, is different. We moved into a new house, and judging by the number of children I see outside on a daily basis, I'm fairly certain we'll have a rather busy Halloween (and loud, too, as my two dachshunds tend to "warn" us about any visitors - and sometimes may keep doing so even after the visitors are long gone). So I've been trying to learn more about the most popular Halloween sweets, since it's not all for me anymore:-).

We give out candy we like. We give out only wrapped, commercially packaged stuff because we figure that we wouldn't let our kids (if we had them) eat something that wasn't known to us to be safe (larger food issues notwithstanding). (That is, we'd have to know who gave the home-made popcorn ball or what-have-you.) We don't give out any non-edibles. No raisins or the like either....just candy.