When he read the American 5 worst treats for Halloween, this dad laughed at the U.S. privilege. He thinks Canada can beat us out for the worst, and he sets out to prove it.
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Candy is always on my mind but never more so than it is at this time of year. In the next few months we get to experience Halloween and Christmas, two times of the year where many cultures accept the idea of turning off your anti-gluttony reflex to enjoy the best of everybody else’s seasonal treats.
Huffington Post recently released their list of the 5 Worst Halloween Treats and I don’t know if it’s because it was written by a resident of the United States or what, but the list did not jibe with me. If you consider a 3 Musketeers bar among the worst candies in the world, you’re living too privileged a life. They are delicious and for a period of two years served as my standby favourite (see, I spelled favourite with a u to give it the Canadian flavour this list deserves) chocolate bar in the whole world.
Because candy consumption is very dear to me, I’m sharing the true, Canadian contribution. Here’s what I’m lovingly referring to as the True 5 Worst Halloween Treats (by a Canadian 80s kid). A list of candies so bad, you can throw them directly into your younger sibling’s pile.
1. Soap Gum
Honestly, I didn’t even know what the real name of this abomination was. Neither my friends nor I ever knew this purple “gum” as anything other than the soap gum. If you’ve ever seen a package of it in your trick or treating pillowcase, you probably have another description for it too: fu$*ing terrible.
IT SAYS RIGHT ON THE PACKAGE THAT IT TASTES LIKE SOAP!
You can’t judge a book by it’s cover but you can judge a human’s opinion of other humans by whether or not they find it appropriate to give this stuff to kids. Every Canadian child grows up thinking “I won’t be the kid of adult who gives young children soap gum, I just won’t.”
Having never given it out, I’m not sure what the appeal of it was to adults. Was it free? Are you one of the people who gave it out? If so, please share.
2. All Sorts licorice candy
Black licorice will always be black licorice. It doesn’t matter if you cover it up in pretty pinks and blues, when you bite into one of these demonic things, the taste of black licorice still invades your mouth.
When I was kid, I though the intricate designs on the candies were neat. I thought the design would somehow make the candy taste better which was why every year, even though I was 99 per cent sure how it would end up, I’d pop one of these in my mouth.
“Maybe the blue part will taste like blueberry and overwhelm the licorice part,” I’d think. But, BLACK LICORICE TASTES WORSE THAN ANYTHING AND OVERPOWERS EVERYTHING!
3. Halloween Licorice Rods
Why? It’s still black licorice. Sure they now look like Halloween instead of cotton candy, and yes they’re a little glossier, but they’re still fundamentally black licorice, which should be put in the bags of no kids ever. Maybe once you could be fooled into thinking these are long, skinny, Halloween jellybeans, but when the first kid comes to your door and tries to explain to you that they were accidentally given black licorice, it’s up to you to rectify the problem.
Start handing out cans of tuna or baked beans. Most people have a potato in their pantry. Give that instead.
4. Halloween Kisses
Honest assumption about these: someone once said “how do we get rid of all the slime on our factory floor?” and someone else said “call it a molasses treat and add the word kiss in there and wrap it up in an orange wrapper.” And then the first person asked “and give them out for Halloween” to which it was answered “yeah, why not?”
And we’ve had them ever since. I suppose another reason an adult might think a child might want these is because it’s easier to hand them out in multiples. Unlike chocolate bars, which adults squirrel away and hand out only one at a time, these are given by the handful. I know that personally because every year I was given these candies byt three or four houses yet every year ended up with 100 of these things at the bottom of my pillowcase.
5. Halloween-sized bags of chips
This seems crazy because chips are so good and are always in the reverse top 5 of things you pick when your parents tell you to pick one more thing from your Halloween pillowcase, but the quantity you get is imply unacceptable.
The bag always looks so full. I always think “there must be 14 or 15 chips in there and that’s not bad 30 minutes past my bedtime.” Then I open it up and feel the waft of chip air blast into my face. By the time I recover sight, I look down and find three chips, maybe 4 if you include the one that’s broken in half.
“You picked it,” my parents would tell me. Then I’d sheepishly nibble around the edges of the chips, trying my hardest to make it seem as though I’d eaten at least seven chips.
Treat? Hell, I’d been tricked!
Top Photo: Flickr/Matthew Frederickson