Stealing The Halloween Candy: It's Proust's Fault!

I confess.

I did it.

After the kids were abed, I made my way to the plastic jack-o-lantern buckets on the kitchen counter, and dumped out both kids' hauls on the floor, on the pretext of sorting through any loose, unwrapped candy or candy they could choke on. 

Looking at the bounty before me, childhood memories flooding back, mouth starting to water, suddenly craving artificial-tasting, factory-made, non-artisan treats, I lost all willpower.  Within seconds, I'd unwrapped and devoured my first Fun-Size Nestle's Crunch bar in perhaps a decade.  The Mounds Bar, we're probably talking 25 years.  And this wasn't my first transgression.  At the Halloween party, I ate one of the ghost-shaped cookies too -- smothered in orange frosting.

It's not that I haven't eaten any candy in years.  

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The Still-Pretty-Great-Pumpkin, or HALLOWEEN: The Next Generation

I remember Halloween pretty fondly from my Upper West Side childhood.

My friends and I used to dress up in home-made costumes -- they were ALWAYS home-made in those days, never store-bought. And we'd trick or treat "for Unicef," shaking our bright orange cardboard boxes -- which I loved putting together the day before, tucking in all the tabs -- chanting in singsong, going from apartment to apartment. (The next day, mom would break open my box and help me count the coins we'd donate.) I had Halloween parties in which my art-loving, ever-creative mom used to "web" a room in our apartment, stringing twine through everything to creative an enormous web. Each string finished off attached to a wooden clothes pin, and each kid at the party got to try to wind that string around the clothes pin and untangle the web. We used to eat candy corn until we got stomach aches. A great time was had by all, and it didn't cost a lot.

But these days, Halloween is big business, the kind of massive consumer-goods-heavy enterprise that makes me think of what one of the PEANUTS gang says about Christmas in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," that it's all run by "an eastern syndicate."

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