Candy in retrospect
Ah, to be young and on a sugar high
BEN POGGEMILLER STAFF/
Halloween has long been a primary source of candy for children. The pursuit of sugar is universal among all children, and most of them will endure a long, cold night and wear any ridiculous thing to get it. As comedian Jerry Seinfeld puts it, “The only thought I had growing up was GET CANDY.” Lately, at least in my neighborhood, the number of trick-or-treaters has declined drastically. This could be attributed to North America’s new patented “Let’s Get Paranoid about Everything” mentality, or it could just be that kids are lazier than ever and just beg their parents to buy them exorbitant amounts of candy. So let’s get nostalgic and remember some of the non-candy aspects of our childhood Halloweens. I’m kidding of course — it was always about the candy.
After their first few Halloweens, every kid realizes that the orange, jack-o-lantern-style plastic buckets aren’t going to cut it anymore, so they upgrade to a large plastic bag or old pillowcase. Children want to receive the maximum amount of candy they can possibly carry without killing themselves. I’m sure that 90 per cent of adult chiropractic treatment is a result of people having carried pillowcases of candy bigger and heavier than they were for their first 13 years of human life.
One thing I always used to do was meticulously plan my Halloween route to maximize candy revenue. Sometimes I would even plan a second trip if the first load got too heavy. I would memorize which streets had the best correlation between the number of “Halloween-active” houses, and the quality of treats given out. For the entire month of October, I put far more effort into Halloween preparations than I did into school.
Of course, the best part of Halloween for me was always the big payoff. Remember coming home and dumping out your entire cache of candy on the floor? It is the most sublime moment a kid ever experiences. The mountain of candy was large enough to found Buddhist monasteries on. After the initial shock wore off, it was down to business: the sorting process.
At the bottom of the barrel were the non-edible items, namely pencils. I actually have some Halloween pencils still around the house because I was never sure if they’d be accepted as official “HB No. 2” pencils on exam bubble sheets. I wish I were making that up. In a special category were those pieces of dark toffee wrapped in orange paper with ghosts and bats on it. I don’t know if people still hand those out, but they were an acquired taste, which I grew to like and I would gladly accept donations from other kids who hated them. I was always disappointed with the white bags twisted at the top, as they usually contained little more than one package of Rockets and a small sucker and other assorted crap candy. I later learned that this is a clever ploy by fickle Halloween benefactors to give out mediocre candy without repercussions. By hiding the quality of candy they’ve given out until the child gets home, the candy is not traceable back to their house, and thus they don’t wake the next day with a yard looking like a Charmin factory explosion. Name-brand chocolate bars were always a strong candidate. A full-size bar was a rare luxury, but the misleadingly titled fun-sized bars were the norm. The best fun-sized bars were Caramilk, Mars, and Three Musketeers due to their increased density over other chocolate bars under the size constraints. Potato chips were uncommon and consequently an item of special interest. The holy grail of Halloween items, however, was the “can drink.” Not only do can drinks contain amounts of sugar that will indirectly send your dentist to Aruba, but caffeine too. Caffeine is an alkaloid found in certain plants, and people in ancient times noticed that when consumed, these plants allowed children to annoy their parents in ways they never thought possible. This is a strong tradition which is still alive today.
Many years later, I’m on the other side of the equation. I enjoy staying home on Halloween to give out candy. Sadly, our yearly numbers have dropped from over 200 to under 50. The kids who do come express little enthusiasm, and are just going through the motions. I don’t make the mistake of asking what their costumes are anymore, because it always ends up being something like a “Cyber-Magic Transfomega [some Japanese word] Monster” or whatever the children are into these days. Maybe it’s just because I’m older now, but Halloween has lost some of its pizzazz. My mother seems to think the decline in numbers is due to children eating healthier these days, but we all know that’s a whole load of white bags twisted at the top.
