HOA bans residents from handing out full-sized candy bars on Halloween: 'This request is intended to help keep the experience consistent throughout the neighborhood'

This HOA wanted to make things fair by dampening the fun for everyone involved. Classic HOA stuff.

As far as I know, there is no law obligating you to pass out candy on Halloween. If you don't want to participate in the holiday, you don't have to. It's all optional in the first place, so why should we regulate anybody's participation in it? That's exactly what this HOA was trying to do, and it rubbed the residents the wrong way. Halloween is all about fun. It should be about kids dressing up in Costumes and going around their neighborhoods asking for candy. Whether or not they get candy, or what kind it is, or how much they get, is part of the fun of trick-or-treating. When I was growing up, we would keep a mental map of all the best trick-or-treating houses in the neighborhood. The places where we knew we could score majorly. And equally important to remember were the houses that didn't seem to care about Halloween. The houses whose doors would be kept dark during the holiday. Or the doorbells you would ring just to find out that nobody was home. This is part of the fun of trick-or-treating. You never quite know what you're going to get. In most cases, you get the standard-size grocery store candy with standard flavors, but sometimes people would make their own choices, and you would end up with something awesome. Maybe one house would give out candy apples to people with the best costumes. Or maybe some houses would give out apple slices because they were being health-conscious. Either way, the fun was in the variety. If everybody was doing the same thing, it would lose its luster. But that's exactly what this HOA was trying to get everyone to do.