I don't give out candy, or anything else, on Halloween. Not for reasons of miserliness or whatever; I simply live in a spooky-looking (at night) log cabin at the end of a very long and dark driveway branching off of a winding and hilly forest road in a low-density area. If any trick-or-treaters have visited my home in the seven Halloweens I've lived here, they were very small, dressed very convincingly as squirrels and raccoons, and left without knocking on the door.
I've had occasion, nevertheless, to form Halloween candy opinions and judgments in that time, from taking my own kids trick-or-treating. Raising kids in an area ("neighborhood" would be inappropriate, here; it's just a road with some houses alongside) where trick-or-treating basically does not happen, you learn where the good nearby trick-or-treating districts are, and you travel to them. This means that pretty much by definition, for the past seven years my kids have trick-or-treated on Halloween only in places known to be especially good for the practice, where there are lots of decorated houses, lots of costumed trick-or-treaters, and lots of friendly people giving out lots of candy.
And I've noticed something depressing in that time. When my kids dump out their hauls at the end of the night, all they've got is famous name-brand stuff, as if they'd gone trick-or-treating in the candy aisle of a Walmart. The chocolate is strictly Hershey- and Mars-brand stuff: Snickers, Milky Way, Krackel, Twix, KitKat, an Almond Joy or two, and so incredibly many Reese's cups. The non-chocolate stuff is just as familiar: SweeTarts, Airheads, Starburst, Skittles, the odd Dum Dum or Blow Pop. Even when we go to the ancient little town down the road that is absolutely famous for the extravagance and originality of its Halloween decorations—so much so that its narrow 18th-century streets genuinely throng with trick-or-treaters all evening, like the concourse of a sports arena a half-hour before the game starts—the actual candy on offer is just a list of the stuff you find in the dismal name-brand variety bags they sell all October in big-box supermarkets.
Do not get me wrong! This is generally how the kids want it. They like the familiar garbage—it's popular for a reason, after all—and any respectable Halloween haul will have plenty of it. But it also ought to have some Weird Candies in there! Not Halloween-themed versions of famous candies, but authentically Weird Candies: unknown candies of unknown provenance, that you can't even be sure how they got into your bag in the first place. That is no small part of what makes Halloween special!
When I was a trick-or-treater myself, a very long time ago, I wasn't exactly glad to get a handful of those hard-ish goo-filled strawberry candies that were always at least half-shattered by the time I unwrapped them; or the beige-colored, vaguely nougat-ish blobs wrapped in twists of unembellished black or orange wax paper; or the hard butterscotch candies in clear cellophane. I would always get a few pieces of granite-hard bubblegum or the errant honey-based taffy tooth-destroyer, either in tile or log shape, and those were always among the very last items still left in the bag or bowl a week later, gnawed grudgingly and with some fear that I would break my jaw on them. It was the dregs, but it was still candy. What I wanted, or at least thought I wanted, were more of the kinds of candies that had TV advertisements—for all the same reasons why, if you'd asked me what I wanted for dinner when I was nine, I might very well have asked for a friggin' Happy Meal.
But what good is a Halloween that gives trick-or-treaters only what they themselves would buy with their allowance money if set loose inside a 7-Eleven? Like a good spooky story, a dumped-out bag of Halloween spoils should include the mildly chilling suggestion of the great unknown, of shadowy unseen depths, and terrors lurking and gibbering around corners. Life is a system of mundane routines made more manageable by learning to ignore the small chances and dangers that can ruin a day or your life; Halloween is a reminder, in fun form, that by the end of each day you live you will have traipsed unknowing across some number of bridges with trolls beneath them. For kids it is also a valuable lesson: Sometimes the only candy available will not be a glorious fulls-size Twix bar, but rather a strange shapeless globule of taffy with only a rudimentary owl-face on its packaging, and you can choose to have this or no candy at all.
It is for this vital purpose that Weird Candies exist: A kid, having exhausted their supply of comforting SweeTarts and Reese's cups but still deep in the throes of sugar madness, takes a chance on an unidentifiable brown blob wrapped in blank parchment paper, incorporating the possibility that it could be a wad of concentrated evil snuck into their bag by Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and then it tastes fine—maybe a little grainy, sure, but sweet and subtly vanilla-tinged and legibly caramel and fine—and then life's fears seem that much more like welcome companions for a little while. And then the kid has encountered the basic inseparability of life's sweetness and the inevitability of death! This is what Halloween is for!
Cop-fueled paranoia about 3 Musketeers bars with razor blades or LSD tabs stuffed inside is no substitute for this. Weird Candy wears its strangeness right out in the open, on its alarmingly unaccountable packaging; a haunted-house ride, after all, does not try to disguise itself as a normal residence, and Halloween does not masquerade as an un-scary day. Razor-candy propaganda is about the basic police-state work of making you afraid of what isn't strange; Weird Candy, like Halloween itself, is about learning to recognize and wring joy from what is.
The Halloween bag filled with name-brand junk is a natural fit with the gross practice of taking kids trick-or-treating in the middle of the damn afternoon, when the sun is still up. Disgusting! This is supposed to be the damn scary holiday! It is for encountering fright, which is not in itself a bad thing but actually a good thing, a healthful response to a human condition with danger and mystery in it, as laughter is for absurdity and crying is for loss. The variety bag of famous candies is the insistence—the cynical, deranging, dismally American insistence—that through the powers of capitalism the world can and must be paved into a place without mystery and thus without fright, which like so much else about American life is actually just pants-pissing cowardice disguised as strength. All of which is to say that the variety bag is fascist to its core.
Bring back Weird Candies! No I am absolutely not talking about Fun Dip.
