|  Later tonight I will be desperately trying to keep up with an amped up 6 year old as she navigates our neighborhood streets, knocking on doors and ringing doorbells, in search of her next sugar high. She's been reminding me daily for the last week that trick-or-treating is right around the corner and she sure doesn't let up when the actual day arrives.
It's a fantastic thing to see Halloween through the eyes of a child. Memories come flooding back of all the times that I used to troll the city streets, begging my heart out. I was never the kid who wanted a cute plastic pumpkin with which to direct people to toss in the goods. I went for the pillow case and wouldn't stop soliciting until that fu*ker was at least half-way full.
It was then that the real fun began. Coming home with aching feet and drooping shoulders, not eager to take off the face paint but rather sit down in the middle of the living room floor and dump out all of your acquired goodies in a pile.
Division of the assets.
At my house, candy got divided into separate sections, ranging from candies that I was allergic to, candies that I would be willing to draw blood if anyone tried to take from me and candies that would be with me long after Halloween was a distant memory and I was feasting on the bird who tries to emulate all the other animals at the deli section.
==DO NOT EAT!!==
I'm allergic to coconut. Which means that Mounds and Almond Joys were out. There's not a great deal of other mass marketed candies out there that feature this addition, but there were always the handful of weirdos who thought that this would be a great sweet for children. Those are the people who were simply hoping to eat the candies if there were any left over. Selfish pri*ks.
==WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?==
Then there were hard candies. Why anyone thinks that those peppermint swirls akin to what they give you when leaving a restaurant would be appropriate for filling the bags of children at Halloween is beyond me. More than likely these are the people who waited too long to purchase candy and the peppermints were the only things left at the Sav-On they stopped by on their way home from work. Although the butterscotch ones were worse, so I suppose I can extend some sympathy to the peppermint people.
==PERFECT POCKET TREATS==
Next came sour treats like Smarties (no, British and Canadian people, they are NOT chocolate here in the states) to Sweetarts to Tart n' Tinys to Nerds. These were always good for taking to school with you, being that they were small and could be sucked on rather than chewed, aiding in discrete illicit candy consumption.
==IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL==
Next were the sour and/or fruity candies that needed mastication. Starburst, Skittles, Mike n' Ike's, and any other candy with a gummy or taffy-like consistency. These were the candies hardest to conceal if you were caught with at school, so they generally were relegated to at-home consumption, usually while sitting in front of the TV and watching afternoon cartoons.
==BAZOOKA JOE IS A SMART MAN==
Gum. There was always a plentiful supply of gum, whether it be in ball form, stick form or paper-wrapped hunk form. I was a gum chewer when I was younger, so I was a bit of an elitist when it came to the rubbery substance. Hubba Bubba was a must, especially if it came in the eye-wateringly good grape flavor. The standards like Double Bubble and Bazooka Joe were also great additions to a Halloween stash. The unmarked, nameless little gumballs wrapped in the clear cellophane paper were the last to be consumed and the quickest to be discarded since they never held a bubble-blowing consistency long enough to satisfy me.
==BECAUSE A KID HAS TO GET THEIR CAFFEINE SOMEWHERE==
Then there were the chocolates. But not every chocolate makes it into the Pantheon of top tier (as illustrated by my pulling out the noxious coconut candies). Snickers, Milky Ways, 3 Musketeers and M&Ms were all coveted and protected with a sneer and a growl whenever would-be swipers would come near. Nestle's Crunch, 100 Grands, Twix, and Kit Kats were in a sub-division of top tier, mainly holding my favor because they had a crunchy texture. Milk Duds were in a category all by themselves, mainly because even though they were delectable, they only came 2 to a little yellow miniature box. How lame is that?
==EL NOMBRE ES DULCE==
There were always the oddballs candies that I never knew what to do with. Some were Mexican candies with flavors I'd never heard of (I've since grown to LOVE tamarind), some were oldies but goodies according to my mom would would happily make off with the Abba Zabbas & Rocky Road treats that I didn't know what to do with.
==SUCK IT, YOU KNOW YOU WANNA==
Then, of course, there were the suckers. Hard, flat, round disks of every color of the rainbow, some with swirls and some with out of the ordinary shapes. Round, bulbous suckers filled with gum or Tootsie Roll were a treat unlike any of the others in the bag. Suckers stayed around the longest, satisfying me well into December if I dispersed them properly.
Having sisters that are 8 & 11 years younger than me provided me with a mentoring role that I delved into long before Midget came along. I gave up trick-or-treating relatively young. After the 6th grade, I wouldn't be caught dead begging. But damned if I didn't drag my sisters up and down the same blocks I'd worked over the years, closing my ears to their whining "I'm TIRED!" statements until their pillowcases were just as full and then taking my 10% cut when we got home.
Hell, that's part of the reason why I wanted to have Midget. Sure, I could just go out and buy myself some bags of candy.... but where's the fun in that?
|
