Kids from poorer neighborhoods keep coming to trick-or-treat in mine. Do I have to give them candy?

[woodsprite]

105. The more the merrier at our house!

For the past 12 years, we've built a large graveyard, that grew to include a maze through our garage, that has expanded through our den and onto our back deck. This year the theme is "clowns". It's more fun house than anything dark and gory. We're not that into gore anyhow, plus, we have new neighbors with a new baby and 3 kids under 7yo. News of our haunted house has spread and we do get people who come in from other areas.

We give kids a choice - candy or non-candy. We have several kids who had allergies to nuts or are diabetic, so we get a handful of non-edible stuff from Oriental Trading (Halloween notepads, crayons, tiny containers of playdoh).

This year the theme is Clowns. We're building a temporary (out of pvc) circus tent at the entrance to our garage for the real little kids that are afraid of the dark maze (poke-a-pumpkin, carnival mirrors, pumpkin chuckin'). They'll still have to walk through the clown's mouth to get into the tent. To get through the maze in our garage the kids will need to push through about 60 hanging pool noodles), find their way into and out of a checkerboard room (walls, floor, ceiling w/ a strobe light and hidden doors), find the exit to the endless hallway (mirrors at full floor/ceiling mirrors at both ends w/ black light and neon stripes), which dumps them into a web room (hanging threads and backlit crawling spiders on the walls), walk down the teeter hall (a slight ramp up, teeter board, and ramp down), exit through a surgical tubing ankle tickler for the candy past a motion-activated jack-in-the-box clown.

Next year's theme: Demented Disney!

To add: the largest year, we've had over 75 kids come through.