I think that we can all agree that the worst moment of anyone of our lives was that one year when we were too old to get dressed in plastic frocks that sort of resembled the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and go from door to door, demanding that people give us candy until we eventually had a garbage bag filled with fun-sized Snickers bars.

In other words, I think I can safely say Trick-or-Treating is the greatest thing ever.

Now, when I say "everybody," I am obviously excluding people who never got to go Trick-or-Treating in the first place, like people who’s parents were Mormons or dentists or something. These people don’t count. But for the rest of us, Halloween used to be one of the best holidays ever.

Yet despite the magical wonderfulness that is getting a huge sack of candy for the price of a small amount of walking and doorbell-pushing, there are still people out there who want to ruin Halloween by screwing up the whole candy giver-kid in a plastic frock transaction.

What these people do, which is even worse than leaving a fishbowl full of candy out with a sign that says "Please take one" (which disappoints all children except for the first one who gets there), is give out candy that they know is crappy, or they’ll even have the audacity to give out crap that isn’t even candy.

What kind of monster denies a child a cheap-ass fun-size candy bar, which provides happiness that far exceeds the minute size of said candy bar?

All you have to do to make a bunch of ugly kids happier than you’ll ever be again for the rest of your life is go to any store that sells food and shill out three bucks on a bag of tiny Butterfinger bars which you’ll probably end up getting to eat most of anyway when a lot of parents don’t let their children stop at your house because it looks so creepy that they think some sort of sex-pervert must live there. So hey, you get to make kids happy and you get to eat candy, too. It’s a win-win!

Yet there are some people who can’t do something as simple as that. I’m not talking about the people who just don’t answer their doors during state-mandated Trick-or-Treat hours. Yeah, these people are jerks, but it’s far worse when people give kids pennies or religious literature.

When you answer your door and you see a kid dressed as Batman demanding food, the kid is expecting to get candy, or at least something remotely edible. You’ve already raised his expectations by answering the door, and Batman has gotten his hopes up. Which means when you give him wax lips or a pamphlet entitled "Don’t forget about Jesus during your pagan candy- hoarding ritual," you’re breaking his heart more than you would by not answering your door at all.

The following is a list of the four worst things that I remember getting several times while Trick-or-Treating as a kid, with brief explanations as to why it should illegal to give any of this crap to kids who are expecting candy.

Candy corn
If you need to be told why candy corn is a really bad idea, then you’ve either never eaten it before, you’ve eaten it but you have no sense of taste or you’re an idiot. Candy corn somehow manages to be the only food product in the history of the world that crumbles like it’s made out of pressed-together dirt clumps, yet it is also so hard that it will chip your teeth if you try to chew it.

Those weird black taffy things
OK that’s not their "actual" name, but you probably know what I mean; they’re unlabeled little pieces of taffy, or something, that are black and are wrapped in unmarked, black wrappers. Also they taste like black licorice that’s been peed on.

They had orange counterparts too, which weren’t bad, but the black ones always lined the bottom of any given candy bag since nobody wanted them, and every once in a while you’d have to shift through them to see if a Snickers bar accidentally got mixed in with them. Then when you were out of real candy you’d throw them out with the bag.

I don’t even know what these things are called, since my research (me searching Google for "black chewy treats") resulted in me finding pornography so horrifying that now I wish I could sandblast the internet.

Pennies
I’m not talking about when you were in fifth grade and you had the UNICEF box that you collected pennies with when you Trick-or-Treated that you were going to use to feed the starving children of the world. Even I wouldn’t badmouth UNICEF.

I’m talking about the old ladies who, regardless of whether or not you had a UNICEF box because they probably didn’t even know what UNICEF was, would give you a knotted sandwich bag with 10 pennies in it. It’s as if they’re saying, "I don’t want you to have candy, so I’m just going to give you 35 percent of the cash equivalent of candy."

Religious literature
Apparently dressing up like a cowboy and asking strangers to deposit candy into a plastic bag with a friendly, cartoon ghost printed on it is an abomination towards Jesus, because some people consider Halloween and all Halloween-related activities to be a threat towards their religion (and congratulations if your faith can be threatened by pumpkins and Bob the Builder costumes).

I don’t want to dump on anybody’s religion, but what kind of person gives children brochures that tells them that what they’ve been doing for the past few hours will send them to hell? In defense of that, however, that’s still a lot scarier than a friendly, cartoon black cat or a smiling ghost.

In summation: May your drunken Halloween parties be candy-corn free.