The Four Great Candy Holidays, Ranked

There are four great candy holidays: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter.  But which is the best?  A ranking, from worst to best.  

4. Christmas candy.  Basically candy canes and taking regular candy and making it all green or red.  Gets some positive points for the fudge and the mint flavorings here and there...but still, it's a distant fourth. 

3. Valentine's Day candy.  Either it's really sweet and overly sugary candy, like Skittles, or it's chalky stuff like those message hearts, or it's substandard chocolates with all sorts of filling, not all of it good (hello, coconut). 

2. Halloween candy.  Here there is a great kind of variety...but the problem with Halloween candy is that, with the exception of candy corn (which really kinda sucks), it's mostly candy that you get other times of the year.  It's just specially packaged in spooky looking wrapping.  Plus there's the problem that you're never really sure what you get when you trick or treat.  Do you get stuck with people who want to hand out Almond Joys?  Gross.  Halloween gets positive points for the absolute quantity, but the quality just ain't there. 

1. Easter.  Now you're talking...cadbury cream eggs, chocolate bunnies, jelly beans (as long as there's no licorice) and all those tiny little chocolate eggs that sometimes have crunchy rice (does that make it healthy?).  This is hands down the best holiday candy of all.  And the great thing about it is that the other seasons all build up to Easter candy season, so we are saving the best for last. 

I guess all the seasons are great...but for me, Easter candy is the best. 

President's Day

Today is President's Day.  Once upon a time this day was actually two holidays, Jefferson's Birthday and Washington's Birthday, but when Congress decided to create a holiday for Martin Luther King they didn't want to create one more holiday, so they consolidated those two birthdates (conveniently both in February) into one holiday, President's Day. 

And a stupid holiday it is, because while we may honor founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson, we also have lumped into this holiday the Warren G Hardings and the William Henry Harrisons of our national history.  And one day, good grief, Donald Trump will be in the past and this holiday will then be 1/45th of his by default.  😖 

Of course, this isn't the dumbest holiday in our country...tied with it likely is Columbus Day, which in recent years has come under fire for a)honoring a man who never came to this country, actually, b)wasn't the first (there were Indians here, not to mention the Vikings and likely others who found there way here) and c)was only one of many who went west at the end of the 15th century.  Why we honor Columbus alone I don't really know.  But it's a holiday, the dumbest holiday of all. 

Every other holiday has a purpose...Veteran's Day honors veterans, Labor Day honors organized labor, etc.  Our problem is not in the idea of these holidays, but rather in our execution of it...it makes no sense to me that we close schools and libraries on many of these days rather than use this time to educate as to what our nation is about.  Our holidays have lost meaning because we forget to educate.  And as we are educated, then we begin to look at some of these holidays in a brand new light:  consider how Columbus Day is sometimes re-labeled indigenous people's day, in honor of those who were already here...yet this hasn't really caught on.  So what should we do? 

For President's Day, let's re-label this day Founder's Day.  In doing this we honor not Presidents (nor have to make other honors for Congress, the Supreme Court, or the Bureaucracy), but rather the founding principles of this country.  We already have Independence Day to be sure, but that looks back to 1776, while in fact 1789 and the creation of the Constitution might be a better marker for us.  On this day we honor the hard work of all those who have come before us, to honor that we stand on the shoulder of giants who gave us not only independence, but the life that follows. 

And for Columbus Day?  Let's now call it Immigrant's Day.  Columbus, if nothing else, helped pave the way for many people to come to America during the following decades.  Yes, the indigenous people suffered...but many of us owe our life to those brave men and women who pulled up stakes in their home country and decided to come to a land of new opportunity.  My ancestors have likely been here for well over 200 years; others haven't been here nearly this long.  But together, by the grace of God, we all make this country what it is.  Trumpites are wrong for not being able to see this, that the strength of this country comes because it is continually infused with new blood.  We need immigrants in this country, and having a day to honor them might well go against the increasingly nativism that Trump and his cronies cook up in order to make people afraid. 

Halloween

Halloween is the first of the great American candy holidays.  My kids have been excited about it for weeks, and they came home tonight with two buttloads of candy...seriously, the biggest bowl we had only held half of it.  Our three biggest bowls are now filled to the brim.  I have no idea how we will eat this much...I think I got about a tenth of this much candy when I was a kid and it made me fat.  Good thing we parcel it out a bit more than was the case when I was a kid.  If we can keep them (and me) from sneaking it, this candy might last us six months.

As for me, though...I'm done with Halloween.  The cheap superhero costumes, the diabetic-inducing excess, the endless parties that waste yet another day of the kids' schoolyear (and then destroy any sense of discipline for a few weeks as the kids come down from a sugar high)...I really don't want to do this anymore.  What on earth turned a day in honor of the dead into raving children banging on doors demanding candy?  It's not cute, it's Trumpian in its deplorability.  I'm ready for it to go away completely.  It won't, of course.  Nor will the pounds that are put on again from all the high fructose corn syrup.

Forget taxing cigarettes or banning drugs...why aren't we doing more about this health nightmare?  I really would love to hear Michelle Obama talking about the virtues of giving out celery sticks and apples, but then I would also have to sit through endless fat pasty white Republicans talking about how unAmerican she is, even as they moan and gripe about how terrible our country has become.  And then I'd want to go and drive my car into a tree.

Now excuse me as I grumpily go and swipe a Kit Kat.

The Four Great Candy Holidays

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)?