For shame!

LITTLE ROCK — ONE OF the rules around this outfit is: Readers only want to hear the voice of God when it’s God. If it’s not coming from On High, from the Big Guy himself, then it better not sound like it. What do you thinkthis is, anyway, the New York Times?

But sometimes, we can’t help it. Y’all need a booming, intense, (al)mighty chewing out. With a bunch of Thou Shalt Nots thrown in. And some verilys and camest forths and begats and begots and maybe even a paragraphor two in red letters. Especially this weekend.

Because according to something called the NPD group (“More than just market research-a business relationship!”) parents will eat half-count ’em, half-of all the candy bars their children bring home on Halloween.

Harry Baltzer, vice president of this NPD thing, says the adults in households are also more likely to snag the chocolates, too. Which we reckon leaves the kids with just popcorn balls and black licorice.

You all should be ashamed. Thou shalt not purloin the Snickers. Nor shalt thou pinch the Hershey’s. For shame! (Not that we’ve ever done anything like that.)

You know what’s great? When one Mom and Dad on the block take Halloween seriously and get those fourpacks of Reese’s cups to give away to the neighborhood ghouls and ghosts.The package itself is darn near a foot long, filled with the most hallowed form of Halloween delicacies: peanut butter mixed with chocolate! (Smack.) Sometimes it’s all you can do to wait till you get the black wrapping off before scarfing the stuff down.

Let us tell you (and what choice do you have at this point?), it was a sad day for humankind when somebody came up with those individual packages, the ones with just one cup stashed inside, all by its lonesome. We’d like to meet the “marketing genius” whose idea that was. We’d have some choice words for him. Two Reese’s cups should be the minimum in any package. By federal law, if not the one handed down at Sinai on tablets.

Ahem.

But, of course, we’d buy those fourpacks ourselves. We’d never think of slipping just a few into a pocket when the 9-year-old turns her back.

According to those who keep upwith such things, Hershey bars and Nestle Crunches are in the Top Five when it comes to the most popular Halloween candies. So are Nerds and Hot Tamales. And so long as the kid has a lot of Nerds in the bucket, thenshe’d probably not miss that Nestle Crunch, right?

But it’d still be wrong to take it. Thou shalt not filch the chocolate and leave the sour gum-drop things. Y’all should be ashamed. Us, we are heartily sorry and will never do it again, probably. On our honor,with fingers crossed.

SOME will go all-out this weekend, and pass out Baby Ruths. And not the mini-bars, either, but the fulllength originals. Imagine that. Now that’s a house that doesn’t deserve to be rolled this year. Remember the great feeling it was to bite into that candy bar even if it meant brushing your teeth for the next hour? You got your peanuts and your chocolate and your caramel and that stuff they call nougat all right there in one package. Whatever nougat is, it’s heavenly. And you got to love a candy bar that doesn’t limit the peanuts to the inside, but pokes a bunch of peanuts around the outside and holds them together with more chocolate. Blessed are the parents who hand out full-sized Baby Ruths for Halloween.

Because the kids love them, of course.

Responsible adults will buy their Baby Ruths with their own money and not tell the little one that This One Looks Ripped and promise to throw it away but we’ll just put it on top of the icebox for now because we don’t feel like walking outside at the moment and-Hey!-didn’t you say you like Gummy Worms and didn’t you get a bunch?

Thou shalt not distract your children with the non-chocolate offerings found in their Halloween buckets. Nor shalt thou team up with the spouse who likes Almond Joys and won’t tell if you won’t, especially since there are, like, a million Milky Ways, which you like, also in the bag and it’d probably be bad for the kid’s teeth anyway and we can always add a bunch of suckers that we didn’t give away tonight to make the bag look fuller. She’ll never notice. We hope.

And in conclusion, as Bill Clinton used to say, inspiring a vast wave of relief:

Y’all should be ashamed.