As I was leaving my aerobics class the other day, I overhead some mothers talking about how hard it is to stay out of their kids’ trick-or-treat bags while they’re at school. One mom said, “I get all the Reece’s and Snickers’ bars. My kids don’t like anything with peanut butter or nuts in it.”

I’m so jealous! I wish I could have dibs on the Reece’s, but they’re everybody’s favorite. Instead, my kids give me their Almond Joys.

We ended up with a huge stash of candy this year, after nearly a week’s worth of trick-or-treating. I think since Halloween officially fell on a Sunday, everyone decided to come up with alternative events. So we attended “Fall Festivals” at our church and school, which of course landed the kids huge bags full of sweets.

For a little extra fun, we also stopped at a “Trunk or Treat” at a friend’s church and got caught up with everyone. And then, on a whim, we decided to join another friend’s family trick-or-treating in her subdivision. “My neighbors really get into it,” she warned me. “You’ll see.”

Oh my.

I’ve never seen anything like this. We had such a blast. There must have been 300 kids out trick-or-treating. No cars. Everybody was driving around in golf carts or 4-wheelers pulling wagons full of kids in costume. It was hilarious. I kept wishing I had some Japanese friends visiting us so we could take them out and let them enjoy this weird, wild American custom.

We must have visited 30 or 40 houses, and every neighbor went all out, with huge baskets of candy on the front porch, fluffy small dogs sniffing at cowboy and astronaut boots, little white-haired ladies asking, “And what have we here? A little princess and a fairy! Oh, you look so lovely, dear.”

It was wonderful. Parents got to chat while kids compared their stashes. I saw two little boys dressed like a skeleton and a Storm Trooper sit side by side on a garden bench, saying, “I’ll trade you a Hershey’s for that Kit-Kat.” Two dads strolled by discussing the size of their lawn mower engines. “I’m saving about an hour every time I cut my grass with my new mower,” confided one dad to the other.

But the real treat for me came at the end of the evening, when my kids dumped their bags in the front hall and were sorting their loot. (Don’t you remember doing this same thing?)

Here’s the beautiful question they asked me. “Mama, do you want our Almond Joys?”

“What? You don’t like Almond Joys?”

“No,” they informed me. “The coconut is squishy and nasty. And we don’t like those kind of nuts. You can have ours.”

Isn’t coconut a fruit? And aren’t almonds one of the approved snacks on the South Beach Diet? I happily relieved them of those adult-friendly candy bars and put them in the refrigerator, where I can savor them … slowly.

Too bad there’s no such thing as a calorie-free Almond Joy. I guess that’s why us moms end up at aerobics — working off our kids’ leftover candy.