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)?