By Dan Miller, Today's Family Editor

Halloween has always been a holiday built on negotiation. As kids, we negotiated how late we could stay out, how far from home we could roam and how much candy we were allowed to eat before our parents started using words like “stomachache” and “tomorrow.”

Then there was the weather. Growing up in Northeast Ohio, Halloween costumes were often designed with absolutely no consideration for the possibility that it might be 40 degrees and raining sideways. I remember one year when my mother sewed me a vampire cape. It was magnificent. I had the teeth. I had the cape. I was ready to terrorize the neighborhood.

Then my mother looked at the thermometer. Her position: I had to wear a winter coat. My position: Dracula did not wear a winter coat. After intense negotiations, a compromise was reached. I wore the winter coat underneath the cape.

Instead of looking like a sleek, mysterious vampire, I looked like Dracula after somebody hooked him up to an air compressor. The plastic vampire teeth weren’t much better. They seemed like an essential part of the costume until I discovered that they made talking nearly impossible and produced enough saliva to qualify as their own weather system. “Trick or treat” came out sounding like something spoken by a heavily sedated walrus. Eventually the teeth went into my pocket, where most elaborate childhood costume accessories ultimately ended up.

One year my younger brother was sick and couldn’t go trick-or-treating. My parents sent me out carrying a second bag so I could collect candy for him. This required another level of negotiation.

At every house, I had to explain that the extra candy wasn’t for me.

“My brother is sick.”

Sure he is.

“He really is.”

Of course.

I could see the skepticism in people’s faces. Apparently I was the first child in America ever to discover the brilliant strategy of inventing an ill sibling to double his candy haul. Still, most people gave me a second piece.

When I got home, I naturally attempted to negotiate a percentage of my brother’s candy as compensation for my labor. I had walked the miles. I had endured the suspicion. I had carried the bag. My proposal was rejected. Childhood labor laws were apparently much different then.

Years later, when I became a parent, I discovered that Halloween negotiations had not disappeared. I had merely changed sides of the table. My kids wanted to know exactly when trick-or-treating started, how long they could stay out and why we couldn’t drive to another neighborhood after ours was finished. There were negotiations over costumes, candy consumption and whether wearing a coat would “ruin everything.”

Apparently my mother had passed the weather argument directly to me.

Then there was the house that gave out full-size candy bars. Every neighborhood has one. Kids talk about that house with the reverence adults reserve for five-star restaurants.

My children eventually came up with what they considered an ingenious plan: Go to the full-size candy-bar house, return home, change costumes and go back. They believed this demonstrated initiative. I believed it demonstrated fraud.

Their argument was that the homeowner would never know. My argument was that if you have already received a full-size Snickers bar from a stranger, perhaps you should simply be grateful and move along. I won that one.

There were plenty of other negotiations. How much candy could be eaten that night? Could candy be taken to school the next day? Were Reese’s Cups considered one piece of candy or two because there were two cups in the package? Did a fun-size bar technically count as an entire candy bar?

And, of course, there was the parent tax. Parents spend years feeding, clothing and housing their children. Halloween provides one small opportunity for reimbursement in the form of miniature peanut butter cups. Children rarely recognize the legitimacy of this tax.

Eventually, though, the negotiations end. Kids get older. Costumes disappear. The plastic pumpkin buckets are put away. Nobody argues about coats or curfews or whether they can have just one more piece of candy before bed.

And strangely enough, you miss it. You miss watching them race from house to house. You miss inspecting the candy pile on the living room floor. You even miss the ridiculous negotiations. Because Halloween was never really about the candy. It was about an ordinary October night when children got to become somebody else for a few hours, neighbors opened their doors and families made memories without realizing they were doing it.

Although, for the record, I still believe I deserved at least 20 percent of my brother’s candy.