The best candy for halloween
Halloween is almost every kid’s favorite holiday, and it’s generally for two reasons. First, you get to dress up in an awesome costume. Second, you get the best candy for halloween. And what kid doesn’t like candy?
Well, I suppose diabetic kids. But aside from that small subset, I can’t imagine that there are too many kids who don’t look forward to getting the best candy for halloween.
My favorites, when I was growing up, were Kit-Kats and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Like every other kid I would choose my favorites and eat them first, then try to trade what I deemed to be the inferior candies to siblings or friends in exchange for more of what I loved. Sometimes it worked, usually it didn’t. My problem was that I felt the best candy for halloween were the same treats that almost everyone else felt was the best candy for halloween, so after working my way down through the list after Kit-Kats and Reeses Peanut Butter cups, I’d invariably end up snacking on an apple or some other similar lame “treat” that one of the neighbors had given out in lieu of actual candy.
The humorist David Sedaris wrote a great story about the best halloween candy in his collection of essays “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.” In it, Sedaris tells of neighbors who went away to a lakehouse for Halloween, coming back the next day with their kids in tow. Because they were at a remote cottage for the holiday, the kids hadn’t had the chance to trick-or-treat like most kids.
So the parents took them around the day after Halloween to trick or treat, at a tiem when everyone else was already out of candy. As a result Sedaris had to give the neighbor’s kids some of his candy, a wrong for which he never forgave them. It’s a story that struck a cord with me, since we had some weirdo neighbors who didn’t celebrate Halloween themselves and I suffered a similar experience when I was that age.
Ok, so it should crack me up in retrospect, but the reality is that that’s not the type of thing you forget when you’re a kid! I was robbed of my best candy for halloween, and I hold a grudge to this day. It’s good to know I’m not alone in that, even if it is relentlessly childish.
