Question: What do National Chocolate Day, National Candy Corn Day and National Caramel Apple Day have in common? That’s right; they all occur during ‘National Blood Sugar Awareness Week’ or as some call it, Halloween.
Fun fact: yearly, America produces 35 million pounds of:
A, outer envelopes from Pop Tarts
B, coffee grounds from Café Cubano
C, candy corn
Answer below……
The average American consumes between 3 and 4 pounds of candy over Halloween. This equals the sugar a person from the British Isles consumes in an average meal. If we eat that much sugar, we experience things of which we may not be fully aware. A sugar rush is welcomed until that experience over whelms our capacity to enjoy Café Cubano, The national drink of Calle Ocho. If you feel like cleaning the house after one of these treats, you have fallen victim to the sugar rush and its insidious consequences.
Halloween is the time we get to don a costume and pretend to be a character from movies, history, Broadway or our own bad dreams. Sometimes we want to be a clown. Dating back to the middle ages, (The years before Facebook) court jesters were brought before the King to take his mind off the fact that flush toilets were yet to be invented. Up to this point most clowns were seen to be funny buffoons. If they weren’t, the job didn’t last too long with the jester being thrown into the moat or worse, be forced to watch reruns of ‘Jersey Shore’. It was a tough job. There were no balloons.
Since that time some clowns have found meaningful work striving to make antsy children at birthday parties sit in one place for an extended period of time while the parents have a drink or two. This is difficult work and takes someone with patience, tolerance and a need to perform the chicken dance multiple times in an afternoon.
The latest fad is the so called ‘evil clown sighting’.
There have been hundreds of clown sightings throughout the United States which have all been debunked or resulted in many arrests from false reporting by people on a ‘sugar high’. The New York Times was calling the clown hoaxes “a contagion” to equal being forced to watch a televised candidate’s debate.
Reality check: scary clowns are not coming for your children, but kids, if you don’t clean your room, do your homework and occasionally watch your little brother or sister, I’m not promising they won’t.
Let’s forget about the scary clowns that aren’t there and concentrate on candy which is the real reason for Halloween. It’s the best marketing ploy since The Kardashians got you hooked on the fact that if you ‘Kept up’ with them, you could be like them. Don’t be fooled. No one wants to be that vapid!
Gone are the days when apples and other fruit would do as a Halloween treat. We’re way beyond that now. They don’t display fruit in the Halloween section at Walgreens. That’s one reason yellow fingers from Cheez Doodles® are a ‘badge of courage’ in middle school.
The top branded retailer of candy corn, Brach’s, sells enough candy corn each year so that if the kernels were laid end to end it could circle the earth 4.25 times or pave the highway to your dentist’s office.
This candy taunts us with caloric excess and yes, carnauba wax, which is used as a surface finishing agent in baked foods, mixes, chewing gum, and auto, floor and shoe polishes. It’s what gives the shine to candy corn, gummy bears and big red wax lips.
We used to buy wax lips to fool people into thinking we had big red lips. Plumped lips are in fashion but they don’t come in a box at the candy counter, they’re much more expensive and they call it a silicone treatment which is just the right accent for that old Mick Jagger costume. Happy Halloween!
Answer…..Candy Corn of course!
