Tag Archives: candy

Sweet Obsessions

Christmas, etc., food, holidays, humor, , ,

Everyone has their favorite candy, from Ronald Reagan’s Jelly Belly jelly beans to the butterscotch cotton candy that Trump wears on his head. At Halloween, these preferences really come out. We know that children prefer full-size candy bars and hate boxes of raisins, and that everyone hates candy corn. (I don’t know why. As far as I can tell, it’s pure sugar, which should make it popular. But I digress.)

But candy doesn’t just make its appearance on Halloween. There are Valentine’s boxes of candies and Easter candies like Cadbury’s Creme Eggs (though I’ve noticed that these days, Easter baskets come with more toys than treats. It just seems to me inappropriate to celebrate Easter with Spiderman action figures. But I digress again.)

I have fond memories of Christmas candies. Every year, my sister and I could count on finding in our stockings an assortment of Life Savers packaged to resemble a book. We never tired of them. (We also got an orange that filled the toe of the stocking. This was no surprise, as every year our Grandma in Florida sent us a crate of them. But I digress some more.)

Through the years, my taste in candies changed. I fondly remember Reed’s Cinnamon red-hot candies that looked like Life Savers, but with a dip in the middle rather than a hole. I went through a Tic-Tac phase (never mind that they were marketed as breath mints). Now I’m very fond of Sanders’ dark chocolate bourbon-flavored sea salt caramels.

Salt and sweet make a great combination. After all, the four food groups are salty, sticky, sweet, and crunchy, which makes nature’s perfect food the chocolate-covered pretzel stick (sprinkles optional). If you look hard enough, you can even find chocolate-covered potato chips. There’s a local potato chip manufacturer and a local chocolate purveyor who team up every year to make them.

My Aunt Thelma and Uncle Earl had a general store in Campton, Kentucky, which offered a vast supply of penny candies, which actually cost a penny in those days. Sugar Babies were my favorite, along with their larger cousin, Sugar Daddy (no rude remarks, please). I also had least favorites, such as jawbreakers, Butterfingers, and Good’N’Plenty.

Recently, however, I’ve developed a new sweet obsession. I saw that there were dark-chocolate-covered dried Montmorency cherries available locally, but made in Michigan. I absolutely despise regular chocolate-covered cherries. I hate the sickly sweet goo between the cherry and the chocolate. But I had hopes that goo would not be a component of the dried kind of chocolate cherries. So I bought a couple of small bags.

It turned out they were amazing! The dried cherries were chewy and tart, with a texture like raisins. The dark chocolate coating was a perfect complement. Before long, I had devoured both bags.

Then I noticed a whole box of the candies for sale. I had to have it. I thought it would contain a number of the small bags of cherries. But no. It contained one large plastic bag filled with three pounds of yum. It’s all I can do to keep myself from diving in headfirst and binging into a potentially dangerous chocolate-and-dried-cherry sugar rush. (The small bags say that eight candies equal 130 calories. I’d have a Willy Wonka blueberry (only cherry) moment if I ate my fill. But I digress even more.)

I hope they sell well. Well enough, anyway, that they aren’t discontinued, but not so well that stores run out of them. While I wait to see, at least I have pounds of them to see me through.

Holiday Mash-Up

Christianity, Christmas, etc., holidays, religion, , , , , , ,

Quick quiz: What do Jesus and the poop emoji have in common? They both are associated with Easter, silly!

Don’t believe me? Just go to the Easter display in your local store. There you can find cross-shaped tins of candy with the saying “Jesus Saves” and the offer “Jesus Jelly Bean Prayer Inside.” Then there’s the ever-so-seasonal pastel plastic poop emoji that, well, poops candy. (It also has whimsical bunny ears. As you can see.)

Now I don’t mind the mash-up of Christian Easter with its pagan roots. That practice has been around long enough to make it into a tradition. The pagan symbols of Easter are relatively easily adapted from their earlier symbolism of fertility and renewal to their Christian identification with resurrection. New life, and all of that. Eggs. Lambs. Chicks. Even bunnies, that most suggestive of symbols for burgeoning life.

But lately, there’s something … odd about the merchandise that’s offered for consumption on Easter. It’s not just that the pagan roots are showing. It’s more like Easter is getting confused with Christmas. Or maybe Halloween. Easter is getting to be yet another occasion for retailers to make a buck in the name of wretched excess. 

Look at the Easter displays in your local supermarket or department store. You’ll find baskets, all right, but many of them look more like trick-or-treat pails than things a seasonal rabbit would deliver. Now you can find them shaped like a Troll head or Mickey Mouse, and adorned with Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman, Despicable Me Minions, Spiderman, and other characters more often associated with Halloween costumes. There are even felt “baskets” adorned with pictures of dinosaurs and volcanos.

(Dinosaurs have theological implications, of course, as reminders of evolution. When pressed, some Christians will claim that dinosaur bones were put into rocks by Satan, to test the belief of the faithful. But I digress.)

Obviously, these assorted characters are meant to appeal to media-obsessed kids, and so are the trinkets the Easter baskets are loaded with. Barbies. Water guns. Chocolate soccer eggs. Posters and stickers and PJ Masks toys. Any gimcrack fancy that can pull in a few bucks, whether or not it’s related to Jesus or Oestre.

When did superhero, sports, and other fashionable toys become symbols of Easter? Back in the day, we got plush rabbits. Of course, we also had a limited choice of sweets – jelly beans, gum drops, and chocolate bunnies (which occasioned the eternal question of whether to bite off the ears or the tail first). Christmas candy consisted largely of candy canes and “books” of Life-Savers. Halloween candy was much more varied. 

Halloween has already surrendered its place as a Christian celebration (the eve of All Saints’ Day) to being a childhood ritual of door-to-door sugar-laden extortion. Sugar skulls for Día de Los Muertos may be gaining on fun-size Snickers.

Now both the commercialism of Christmas and the pop culture iconography of Halloween have made their way into children’s Easter baskets. The hell of it (sorry not sorry) is that it’s most likely too late to turn back now.

Mash-ups of Christian and pagan holidays are par for the course. We get the Druidic Christmas trees and the Coke-ified Santa (originally a Christian Saint Nicholas) and the exchange of gifts on Saturnalia melded with of the celebration of a quiet birth.

I’m not saying that cultural mash-ups aren’t fun or happy or festive. I’m just saying it’s all gotten a little out of hand. We now have the ubiquitous image of Santa kneeling at the manger. How long until we have Mickey Mouse rolling away the stone?