Emily Duprie
One of the best parts of Halloween is candy. Kids everywhere look forward to trick-or-treating for months before the big night and then spend hours afterwards tallying and trading all of the loot they’ve brought in. Obviously the costumes and Halloween festivities are fun too, but both children and adults can always enjoy some candy!
Trick-or-treating is usually aimed at children, given that adults don’t need permission from their parents to buy a chocolate bar or some sour gummy worms. But according to one mother on Reddit, her “super vegan” neighbor just couldn’t resist taking some candy from her children. After the incident, OP rushed to the “Am I The A-hole?” community to ask if her response to the candy thief was valid.
Read the story below in full, along with some of the top comments.
This very angry mother asked Reddit: “AITA for not telling a vegan mom that the candy she stole from my kids and was eating, wasn’t vegan?”
This happened on Halloween and the day following. My neighbor, 38F (super vegan) has 2 kids. I (26F) also have 2 kids. My apartment complex didn’t do traditional tick or treating on Halloween.
Residents were advised to set out prepackaged individual candy bags on their patios/front door areas if they wanted to participate- but the traditional “knock on door, physically hand strangers candy” was not permitted.
She begins…
So, Halloween comes and the kids are all dressed up and each building has a scheduled time where the kids go door to door. I ended up having to work late so my neighbor offered to walk my kids around with hers at our buildings scheduled time. About 45 minutes later my kids came home with a small bucket of candy (6 little goodie bags each from individual apartments that participated) everything was fine, and my kids didn’t say anything weird had happened. They were just excited to eat candy once they got home lol.
The next day, things started to get a little fishy.
The next day I took my kids to the park directly across from our apartment complex. My neighbor was there with her kids as well. The kids were playing and she took out one of those individual goodie bags with candy in it from her purse and started to loudly rummage in it. She ate several pieces of candy and my daughter eventually noticed, ran up and asked if she could have a piece and my neighbor responded “nope, this is my tax candy, remember that This was my reward for taking you trick or treating last night” I was a little weirded out by that statement and asked what she meant.
Her neighbor then proudly admitted that she had “taxed” OP’s children for taking them trick-or-treating.
She said that since she Is the one who had to take the kids out, she took FIVE bags from each of my kids as a “tax.”
Her son then chimes in and said “you only took two bags from us!” she responded with “but I’m your mom, I was doing OP a favor so they get a higher candy tax”
Oh hell no! In shock, OP weighed out her options for her next move, when she noticed the perfect payback.
I was thinking about how to respond when I noticed that she was holding a starburst candy and decided to just smile and nod and go back to watching my kids. I let her continue To finish off the bag of candy and then said “hey, aren’t you vegan? You know a lot of those candies are made with animal products right. “
OP decided to enlighten this “super vegan” with some info about the candies she was hoarding.
I explained what gelatin was and how a LOT of those candies are made with it.
She was horrified, googles it and then told her kids that they were leaving. She said something about how she was going to be sick and stormed off.
Now she’s giving me dirty looks every time we see her and won’t let her kids play if she shows up at the park and we are there.
OP’s husband wasn’t happy with her..
My husband thinks I’m an asshole cause I should have either- not said anything about the gelatin, or said something right away when I noticed.
I don’t think it’s my job to tell a vegan what is and isn’t vegan though, and she deserved it for stealing candy from little kids.
She then added an edit to the post to clarify some information about her vegan neighbor’s master plan.
Edit #1 when we got home from the park after the gelatin incident, I sat my kids down and asked why they didn’t tell me that the neighbor took half of their candy. My oldest kid is six and my youngest kid is four. Six year old explained that as they went door-to-door during their designated trick-or-treating time she would have my four year old grab two bags instead of one from each apartment for the majority of them, she explained it to my kids that they were grabbing extra bags for her to be handed over at the end as taxation. So either freaking way she was directly taking candy from my kids or taking candy from other kids through mine.
As for the authenticity of her vegansim- I may have exaggerated when I said “super vegan” when I first posted this. She claims to be vegan and is very, very in peoples faces about the benefits etc. it’s 100% about the health side- she brags about veganism curing cancer, diabetes, even some mental health issues. I have never once heard her talk about the benefits for animals. She also sells herbal tea products, customized gym clothing etc. so she totes a pretty big vegan “lifestyle” if that makes sense.
Now for the gelatin. She knows what gelatin is, she knows what it’s made out of, she knows that there are obvious things that she can’t eat. But she had no idea that a lot of candy specifically had gelatin apparently. When I told her that they had gelatin in it, she knew what gelatin was but googled the candies to see if I was correct.
Poser vegan perhaps?
I think she is either really dumb or she eats non vegan stuff all the time when no ones watching and had to pretend to be horrified about it at this point, cause a lot of you guys have pointed out that you literally can’t be vegan and not know these things. I’m not vegan, I’m not even freaking vegetarian and I know these things.
OP ended her story with one last valid point:
About the starbursts: a lot of you have said that starburst are vegan friendly. However starburst in the USA are made with animal gelatin. In the UK they ARE vegan though! 😉
EDIT #2 I cannot thank you guys enough for all the insight on this, and if it weren’t for you all commenting and me being able to show my husband, he probably wouldn’t have told me what was actually wrong. Turns out he was calling me an asshole cause she’s been parking in his assigned parking spot and giving him dirty looks since this happened. I had no idea because I work from home and haven’t used the car in days. He finally told me why he was so grumpy about what I did. He hates confrontation and was miss placing his anger at me. I’m gonna talk to her about it first, then management if it doesn’t stop.
I also bought several bags of candy that our entire family has been snacking on since lol.
Summary
Redditors agreed that OP was entirely valid for making the comment that she did. After all, what grown adult steals candy from children? Especially children that aren’t theirs!
