I don’t give out candy or anything on Halloween. Not because of stinginess or any other reason; I simply live in a scary looking (at night) log cabin at the end of a very long and dark driveway off a winding and hilly forest road in a low density area. In the seven Halloweens I’ve been here, if any trick-or-treaters have come to my house, they’ve been very young, dressed up. Very As confident as the squirrel and the raccoon, and walked away without knocking at the door.
Still, in that time I’ve had the opportunity to form opinions and judgments about everything from trick-or-treating to Halloween candy with my kids. Raising kids in an area (“neighborhood” would be inappropriate, here; it’s just a street with a few houses along it) where there’s basically no trick-or-treating, you learn that there are good tricks around the corner. Where are the -or-treat districts, and you travel to them. This means that, by definition, my kids have been trick-or-treating on Halloween for the last seven years Only Places that are considered especially good for practicing are those where there are lots of decorated houses, lots of costumed trick-or-treaters, and lots of friendly people who offer lots of Distribute sweets.
And I’ve noticed something disappointing in that time. When my kids throw out their stuff at the end of the night, they only have famous name-brand stuff, as if they went trick-or-treating in the candy aisle at Walmart. The chocolate is full of Hershey- and Mars-brand stuff: Snickers, Milky Way, Crackle, Twix, KitKat, an Almond Joy or two, and incredibly many Reese’s Cups. The non-chocolate stuff is equally familiar: Sweettarts, Airheads, Starbursts, Skittles, the odd Dum Dum or Blow Pop. Even when we go to the ancient little town down the road it’s absolutely Famous For the extravagance and originality of its Halloween decorations – so much so that its narrow 18th-century streets are actually filled with trick-or-treaters the entire evening, like a playground gathering half an hour before the game starts – real candy. The offer is simply a list of the stuff you find in the disappointing name-brand variety bags sold throughout October at big-box supermarkets.
Don’t get me wrong! kids are usually like this want it. They love familiar trash—after all, it’s popular for a reason—and any respectable Halloween trip will have plenty of it. But it also has to have some weird candies in it! Not Halloween-themed versions of famous candies, but authentically weird candies: unknown candies of unknown origin, that you’re not even sure how they got into your bag in the first place. This is no small part of what makes Halloween special!
A long time ago, when I was a trick-or-treater myself, I wasn’t really one. Happy To get a handful of those hard goo-filled strawberry candies that always disintegrated at least in half the moment I opened them; Or beige, vaguely nougat-ish blobs wrapped in twists of unadorned black or orange wax paper; Or hard butterscotch candies in clear cellophane. I always found a few pieces of granite-hard bubblegum or honey-based taffy tooth-destroyer, in either tile or log shape, and they were always among the last items left in the bag or bowl, even a week later, reluctantly and Some chewed out of fear that I would break my jaw on them. It was filth, but it was still candy. What I wanted, or at least I thought I wanted, was TV commercials featured a variety of sweets – for the same reasons that, if you’d asked me what I wanted for dinner when I was nine, I would have asked for a damn Happy Meal.
But what’s the point of Halloween that trick-or-treat Only What would they buy with their allowance money if they were let loose inside a 7-Eleven? Like a good horror story, a tossed bag of Halloween loot should include the great unknown, shadowy unseen depths, and faint suggestions of horrors lurking around corners. Life is a system of mundane routines that is made more manageable by learning to ignore those small opportunities and dangers that can ruin a day or your life; Halloween is a reminder, in fun form, that by the end of each day you may have unwittingly tripped across some bridges with trolls underneath them. This is a valuable lesson for children, too: Sometimes the only candy available will not be a glorious full-size Twix bar, but rather a strange shapeless ball of taffy with only a rudimentary owl face on its packaging, and you can choose it. It’s this or no candy at all.
It is for this important purpose that strange candies exist: a child, who has exhausted his supply of cozy SweetTarts and Reese’s Cups but is still in the grip of sugar madness, receives an unidentified brown candy wrapped in blank parchment paper. Takes a chance on the blob of, which includes the possibility that it might be a bunch of concentrated evil hidden in his bag by Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and then it tastes great – maybe a little grainy, sure, but Sweet and subtly vanilla-tinged and distinctly caramel and wonderful – and then Fear of Life seems like it’s more than welcome companions for a while. And then the child is faced with the basic inseparability of the sweetness of life and the inevitability of death! this is halloween For!
There’s no substitute for police-fueled paranoia about 3 Musketeers bars with razor blades or LSD tabs. Weird Candy flaunts its weirdness openly on its worryingly irresponsible packaging; After all, a haunted house ride doesn’t try to disguise itself as a normal residence, and Halloween doesn’t come off as a non-scary day. Razor-candy propaganda is about the basic police-state function of scaring you from what Not there. Strange; Just like Halloween, strange candy is learning to recognize and derive pleasure from. Is,
A Halloween bag full of name-brand junk fits naturally with the gross practice of letting kids trick-or-treat at noon, when the sun is still rising. Disgusting! This is supposed to be a very scary holiday! It is to face fear, which is not in itself a bad thing but is actually a good thing, a healthy response to the human condition with danger and mystery, as laughter is to the absurd and crying is to loss. Have taken. The bag of famous sweets is an insistence – a cynical, deranged, hopelessly American insistence – that through the forces of capitalism the world can and should be made a place without mystery and thus without fear, which Much of what we love about American life is really just cowardice disguised as strength. What all this means is that the diversity bag is fundamentally fascist.
Bring back the weird candies! No, I’m not talking about Fun Dip at all.