- April 30, 2024
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The other day, my son Grant held up a candy bar and asked, “Does this say, ‘Health’?”
“No, it says, ‘Heath,’” I said. He was suspicious. But I wasn’t about to try to sell him on it. The longer he was unaware that this was a delicious chocolate-covered toffee, the better. It’s one of the rewards of being a parent: Their ignorance is your bliss, and you get to eat as much of your kids’ candy as you want.
Grant, 6, cradled the fun-sized candy bar in his palm as if he were on the beach and deciding whether to keep a shell for his collection.
He took a Jolly Rancher instead. Apparently, the risk of a Heath bar secretly being healthy was just too high. On the other hand, you can’t go wrong with something called “jolly.”
He tossed it in the bowl, but it didn’t stay there for long. By the time his back was turned, the Heath’s nutrients, such as they were, had already been absorbed into my blood stream.
My wife is a chocoholic, but she’s more selective with the rest. The candy bowl on the counter was still half full, a week after Halloween, but as my wife stirred the remnants, she observed (confessed is more like it): “What happened to all the chocolate?”
Whereas there used to be a smorgasbord of Butterfingers, Kit Kats and Snickers bars, now we’re getting into the Smarties, three-to-a-pack SweeTarts and other candy that no one ever buys except to put in someone else’s pillow case.
Fortunately, I am no respecter of candies. The oft-maligned chocolate-flavored Tootsie Pops? Two licks, two bites, and we’re down to the last morsels of Tootsie Roll clinging to the bone. Little bags of candy corn? You can count on me.
For me, less expensive candy is preferred, because I can eat it quickly, without feeling like I need to savor it. There is something luxurious about eating whole mouthfuls of chocolate, even if it’s only waxy filler disguised as chocolate.
To maximize your intake, you need a strategy for eating from communal candy bowls. You have to assess your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. If I’m the only one who likes sour candy, for example, I save it for last. When my wife is picking through the sour hard candies, searching for a lost Milky Way, I’m in the corner recovering from my Milky Way-induced stomachache, getting ready to leisurely eat what everyone else considered the throwaways.
Thanks to that kind of work in the trenches, and thanks to my mother the lollipop maker, I have built immunity to high sugar levels: I can eat Pixie Stix all day and not get hyper or drowsy.
Still, I’m well aware that my levels of candy consumption are discouraged by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And, as a parent, I can’t condone it in my little cherubs.
Grant, therefore, is limited to a treat after school and one more after dinner. He has his ways of getting around it, of course.
“Hey, Grant, where are you going with that?” I said.
He held up a small plastic bowl rattling with pink Nerds. “I was going to my room,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow and tapped my foot.
“But I’m not going to eat them,” he said. “I’m collecting Nerds.”
I imagined him getting up in the middle of the night, sneaking across his room, removing a picture frame that hides a hole in the wall that he has carefully hollowed out as a Nerds stashing place. He would roll a few pink pebbles of tartness in his fist, pop them in his mouth, and then crawl back in bed with a mischievous smile.
I had to admire his creative alibi — a collection of Nerds: ha! — and if there is anything worth lying about, it’s candy. But I also imagined his teeth rotting and therefore my dentist bill rising like a nuclear plume. So, I confiscated the bowl. Besides, if I let him keep it, what would I eat when he was asleep?
As the bowl continues to dwindle, it’s easy to grow nostalgic. We had good times, me and those Gobstoppers. And the spongy little hamburger gummies. And the ring pops. When the candy bowl is there, you know you have a friend waiting for you.
When it’s gone, we all get grouchy in my house.
“Can I have a treat dad?” Grant asked.
“No!” I barked at him. “You can only have food you don’t like.”
“Oh, OK, so the only thing I can eat is a ham-and-poop sandwich?” he said, raising an eyebrow, tapping a foot in a parody of yours truly.
At first, I was furious. But then, I motioned him to the couch, and we sat together. It was a beautiful father-son moment, as our withdrawal symptoms drove us both silently from denial to acceptance of our problem.
Sweating, panting, I stared longingly at the empty bowl and thought I saw, just for a moment, something hovering near the refrigerator, taunting me with its brown wrapper and gold lettering: HEALTH.
