The Halloween Candy Question

This question is a biggy.  What to do with the kid's Halloween candy?  Do you let them go wild and devour it all in one night and then, well... go wild?  Or do you intervene and regulate it and ration it each day and drag the whole thing out till Christmas?  My kids are still quite young so I for sure am no expert, but I tend to be an advocate of the free market approach.   Many of life's lessons I learned from my young trick or treating days and they still resonate with me loud and true. 

-  The more doors we'd knock the more reward we'd reap.  Hard work pays off.  The years when I called it quits early, my pile of loot was smaller than my brothers and sister.  And my parents, Laissez-faire, allowed it to stay that way. 

-   The freedom that we experienced as we earned and owned our candy yielded opportunities for us to have the freedom to make choices.  We could choose between bartering, sharing, indulging or saving:  each choice with its consequence that we also learned to "own."   We could then, by experience,  evaluate and improve our choices that we made the next time around.   Yes, evaluate....at six, seven, eight years old.  :)  Don't laugh!  Okay, laugh if you want to.  My husband does when I come at him with my passionate discourse about Halloween candy! 

-   We learned to be tough with our bartering skills when we made the choice to trade.  We experienced how value and price can be determined by lots of different factors;  our favorites, their favorites, the amount of candy that remained.  This was intense stuff and could keep us engaged for hours, these sessions with our candy strewn out all over the floor.

-   When we chose to share it made us feel good.  This "consequence" of giving another what we had earned was a lesson that was not lost.  It just feels great when we can choose the right and share with others.

-   When we indulged we felt sick and we'd run out of candy quickly.  What seemed so great at the moment ended in just a whole lot of no fun.

-    Then there was always the sibling that saved.  A tootsie roll left at the end of November...that's real power!  We'd beg to be the one my brother picked to do his chores and then with admiration for him and regret for our poor choices, vow to ourselves we'd practice better self-control when the next Halloween came around.

.............And with all this Halloween inspiration, I think I'll go fill out my sample ballot now.  :)  ha!..........just wish it could really be this uncomplicated.