With the American Dental Association’s favorite fall holiday less than 48 hours away I think it’s high time for a Howdygram exposé of the worst-ever Halloween candy … the useless, tasteless crap you refused to eat as a kid and nobody — not even your little sister — would trade for. The images below appear in no particular order.
Jawbreakers. Because everybody wants a ball of rock-hard sugar bigger than your actual mouth that takes three hours to eat. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Necco Wafers. They’re brittle disks of chalk that taste like cologne, deodorant, feminine hygiene spray and shoe polish, but health-conscious children everywhere should be happy to know Neccos are FAT FREE. At last count there are maybe four people in Indiana who actually eat these things.
Candy Corn. I definitely run a risk if I insult candy corn because Sam actually LOVES this stuff. Candy corn has the texture of candle wax and tastes like Glade vanilla air freshener and Easter Peeps made a flavor baby. This is very, very bad.
Good & Plenty. I never understood trying to disguise stale licorice bullets with pink and white sugar. My mother is only person I ever knew who ate these. She’s currently confined to a wheelchair and lives in a nursing home, so draw your own conclusions.
Circus Peanuts. I think these inedible monstrosities are already 35 years old when they come off the assembly line. They squeak like styrofoam when you squish them, look like misshapen suppositories and taste like crusty old marshmallows from a bag that somebody forgot to seal in the mid-1960s.
Dum Dums. The wrappers on these irritating little lollipops almost never come off so you usually get stuck eating most of the paper. This is actually more appealing than the candy itself, as Dum Dums come in a dozen flavors and they all taste equally lousy. Incidentally, I don’t think it’s a great idea to ever give these to children because if you fall down with a sucker in your mouth you’ll wind up sounding like Andy DeVine (see video below). My mother told me this when I was six and I still believe her. Seriously.
Spearmints. These belong in a jar at the register when you pay your bill at Denny’s, NOT in a Trick-or-Treat bag. Spearmints taste like toothpaste and most kids would rather eat cat poop.
Pastel Tootsie Rolls. Why would anybody think that non-chocolate, artificially-flavored Tootsie Rolls in Crayola colors would be a great idea for candy. The flavors are like Starbursts for sissies, only infinitely worse. The cherry ones remind me of cough syrup.
Mary Janes. They’re hard little slabs of linoleum with a flavor profile reminiscent of peanut butter spray-painted on a Tonka truck. By the time I was 10 years old Mary Janes had successfully pulled every filling out of my mouth and broken my braces twice. These work better as jawbreakers than actual jawbreakers. I hold the same high regard for Bit-o-Honeys.
Dots. Dots are basically little mounds of industrial-grade mucilage manufactured in attractive colors. Think of them as Jujubes on steroids.
It wasn’t my intention to include
Jujubes in this review of Halloween candy, but these little indigestible acrylic nipples are so useless and obnoxious I think they deserve an honorable mention. My sister, a certifiable screwball whose “food issues” started in infancy, lived on Jujubes, white bread and canned shoestring potatoes for at least two decades. I know this for a fact because when she got married in 1974 and moved out of the house my mother discovered two dresser drawers filled with hundreds of empty Jujube boxes. I have no idea what this means. If Dr. Phil is reading this post maybe he could leave a comment.
Happy Halloween from the Howdygram, y’all.
