I have a strong hunch it’s too late for a costume suggestion to be used by some lucky area youngster tomorrow night. Anyway, here it is in case someone wants to use my idea, or better yet, consider it for next year’s Halloween.

What I have in mind is to use a large square box decorated or covered with the color white. Cutouts can be made for the child’s feet, arms and head. (How the child gets into and out of this box is a challenge for the costume’s creator.) Then a motto of “Sugar Cube: The Spirit of Halloween” could be lettered on the front of the box.

This may sound really odd, but the idea of sugar, or better yet candy, being associated with Halloween is certainly correct.

Come to think of it, candy has become an important and sweet part of several special days on the calendar.

For Easter there are candy eggs and small rabbit and chicks (the poultry kind). Christmas has candy canes and various versions of chocolate treats. Valentine’s Day consists of candy hearts and other sweet stuff. As a special touch for Thanksgiving, how about tiny turkey chocolates? And let’s never forget all those parades, especially July 3 in Albert lea and July 4 almost everywhere else. For the younger generation, these parade events actually provide curbside deliveries of candy.

Right at this point, please allow me to be bluntly honest. Since I was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes, the only candy I will now even consider for consumption are the sugar-free versions. Yet, at Halloween time, the children coming to my front door for trick-or-treating will get small, wrapped bars of regular candy. After all, it’s the American way.

However, the first Halloween after I became a diabetic, I did set aside some sugar-free candy just in case some trick-or-treater happened to indicate he or she didn’t want or couldn’t have regular candy.

I quit this special offer after the first year when no one indicated a desire for sugar-free candy. Thus, tomorrow night I’ll continue to hand out the sugar-loaded sweets.

All this Halloween trick-or-treating reminds me of my children and their trips around the neighborhood on those spooky and sometimes wild weather evenings in the quests for free candy.

We had several very nice ladies in our particular part of the city who took real pride in their cookie making. As a result, they didn’t have candy to pass out. Instead, they gave each child a cookie.

It just so happens that my children were somewhat apprehensive of anything they were given on Halloween that didn’t look like candy inside a wrapper. However, they took the cookies, said thank you and moved along quickly to the next house. About a block or so later, one of the children would take a small piece off a cookie and give it to our dog, who enjoyed tagging along on such exciting evenings. The dog was still alive and looking for still more free snacks when they arrived at home. Then the children ate their cookies, plus all too much of the candy before bedtime.

This reminiscing abut Halloween and trick-or-treating reminds me of several incidents based on this American tradition during my growing up days out in east Oregon.

For a few years we had another day on the calendar for trick-or-treating. This was May Day.

The boys in our part of town tried to perpetuate what may have been an effort to start a new local event. After all, who wanted to dance around a May pole? The local adults didn’t care for this attempt to transfer the Halloween concept to a second day of the year at all. Anyway, the May Day deal soon just faded away.

For a few years we also had still another attempt to fill our pockets (and stomachs) with tasty candy. This could have been called pre-Halloween; a prelude to trick-or-treating on Oct. 30. And like the May Day caper, this extension of Halloween didn’t work out either. All we heard from the local folks was, “Come back tomorrow night.”

Ed Shannon’s column has been appearing in the Tribune every Friday since December 1984.