Halloween Is Candy Day

Saturday is Halloween. When you mention the word “Halloween,” many things come to mind: carved pumpkins; wild and weird costumes; haunted houses; trick-or-treaters; yard decorations of skeletons, witches, and ghosts; and gathering together to sing the old traditional Halloween carols, such as, um, such as — hey, there aren’t any Halloween songs, are there? I guess “Thriller” by Michael Jackson and “Monster Mash” by that guy impersonating Boris Karloff are the only songs that even come close. Where is Irving Berlin when you need him?

Anyway, if you are a kid, there is one thing above all others that comes to mind when the word “Halloween” is mentioned: candy. On the official Candy Overdose Meter, Halloween leaves all the other holidays in the dust. You could add up the candy you get from all other holidays during the calendar year — Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Arbor Day (with its delightful chocolate-covered tree bark) — and it would not add up to half of what you get in an over-stuffed pillow case after an evening of trick-or-treating on Halloween.

When I was a kid, each of us would amass at least 40 pounds of chocolate, which was enough candy to keep our acne flourishing for months, until we got a chocolate bunny booster shot at Easter.

Let’s face it, if there was no candy on Halloween, the holiday would be about as exciting as National Dental Hygienist Appreciation Day. (And if there was no candy on Halloween, many dental hygienists would be unemployed.)

To the candy industry, Halloween is similar to what Christmas is for shopping malls: it makes or breaks their entire financial year. Depending on whether or not sales are good during Halloween determines if executives at the Hershey Corporation will receive massive cash bonuses, or instead receive small bags of stale Hershey Kisses. (No, I’m kidding. The big bosses always get their money, but if sales are down, right after they purchase yachts with their bonus money they’ll have to announce layoffs at the factories.)

Halloween sales are crucial to the candy industry, which explains why we started seeing Halloween candy on store shelves around Labor Day. (I was about to take offense at seeing Halloween candy during the first week of September, but then I saw Christmas stuff for sale during the second week of September. Yikes!)

Selling Halloween candy in September doesn’t bug me nearly as much as what has happened to the SIZE of the candy bars. You practically need a microscope to see them nowadays. Just recently I peeled the wrapper off a mini candy bar, and I was stunned. “This is a Snickers?” I said. “It’s not even a Snick!” It was like having an individually wrapped peanut M&M. You’d have to squeeze about two dozen of these so-called candy bars through a Play Doh Fun Factory just to get what used to be considered a medium sized candy bar.

Remember the good ol’ days of our youth, when a jumbo sized Three Musketeers bar was about the same size as a meat loaf? Now that was a candy bar!

The mini, microscopic candy bars are simply embarrassing. And I’m going to make sure the trick-or-treaters who come to our house on Saturday get real candy bars, as large as I can find at the store. 

Correction, I just had a brief discussion with my wife, who informed me of the price of chocolate these days. Apparently, jumbo sized candy bars now cost about the same as a Porsche. So, on further review, the trick-or-treaters who come to our house will get a delightful treat. And in case they’re not sure, I’ll let them borrow my microscope.