We are entering into the first of the four great candy holiday seasons in our country: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter. We wonder why we have an issue with obesity in this country, and we might look no further than these cold weather holidays in which candy is a great part of them all. Halloween, of course, is the easiest one, but Christmas is gaining speed, Valentine's day is the crappiest of all the candy holidays (those little chalk hearts combined with the worst of the boxed candies), and finally one last blast of chocolate eggs that is supposed to last us through the summer.
Made up holidays are nothing new...Valentine's Day really is nothing more than a ploy begun by giftmakers to a)make men feel bad for not doing enough and b)make women feel bad if they aren't loved enough. I'm convinced that many of our national holidays (including tomorrow's Columbus Day) are meaningless, though of course Christmas and Easter have some real meanings.
And it's not a bad thing to think about candy for four days if it was limited to those days; total abstinence from such things for us non-diabetics is perhaps too much to ask. But it's the long season that really gets me. It used to be that only Christmas decorations took over for weeks and months at a time, but now it seems that Halloween candy displays appear the first week of September...and who is really buying candy on Labor Day to hold up in their cupboard for eight weeks, thinking that there won't be any left by the middle of October? Don't they remember that this is America, the land of the free and good and plenty (thankfully a fading brand of candy)?
