I loved Halloween when I was a kid. It was a fun chance to dress up as a character you loved, but more importantly, it was a chance to get hyped up on sugar in a way your mother wouldn’t let you any other day of the year.
The dressing up was kind of cool, although I honestly don’t remember many of the costumes I wore as a little boy. I remember being Batman one year. I was also a character from the Planet of the Apes for a couple of years, because, as a kid I really loved all those movies even though, as an adult, I now realize they were all laughable except for the original, which remains one of my Top 10 favorite movies.
“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape,” which Charleston Heston said to one of the gorillas who captured him in the movie, is one of the great film lines of all time, in my opinion.
But this isn’t a column about apes. It’s a column about candy, which is a better reason to like Halloween than costumes, also in my opinion.
Trick-or-treating was a great experience when I was a child, because I grew up in a time where you could knock on any door in your neighborhood and not worry about whether some crazed psychopath was going to give you candy tainted with poison or an apple with a razor in it.
Instead, the people in my neighborhood (And here I go talking about my neighborhood again. Deal with it.) gave a great selection of candy. There was one house – I don’t remember which house it was – that gave out candied apples, which really wasn’t a bad thing unless you hated candied apples, which I did.
Some houses gave out Blow-Pops and Tootsie-Pops, which was fine, and I even liked houses that handed out Sweet-Tarts. But I preferred houses that gave chocolate. Really, any chocolate was fine. I really liked Hershey bars. M&Ms, plain or peanut, were good, too. I really felt I had a good night if I came home with more than one Snickers.
I bring all of this up for one reason: A recent survey found the most popular Halloween candy in each state, and the most popular candy in Georgia is the Jolly Rancher, which gives me grave concerns about the heck is the matter with kids today. In fact, only two other states – Arizona and Utah – has the Jolly Rancher as its favorite candy, and I don’t think Georgia wants to be agreeing with either of those two states.
Our neighbors in Alabama aren’t much better. The most popular Halloween candy there is candy corn, which is about the same as chewing on flavored candle wax. On the other hand, maybe I should do my trick-or-treating these days in Florida, where, for all their other faults, they have the good sense to make the Snickers bar their most popular candy.
Apparently, I’m in the minority when it comes to loving chocolate candy for Halloween. Only 18 of the 50 states have chocolate as its favorite. Candy corn, as outrageous as it seems, is the most popular, and only one state, North Carolina, prefers M&Ms.
I’ll soon be buying the candy I’ll hand out on Halloween night, but I doubt I’ll pay much attention to what this survey says.
Feel free to knock on my door, if you want. But you’d better be happy with a Snickers bar.
