Halloween Candy: The Good, the Bad, and the Just Plain Awful

  

Halloween Candy: The Good, The Bad, and the Just Plain Awful

Halloween is around the corner. For many, that brings to mind ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. For me, Halloween has always meant snack nirvana. Halloween is the only American holiday that isn’t associated with a nutritious meal. Who needs that when you have candy? When I was kid, my siblings and I would sit around after trick-or-treating salivating over delightful piles of Almond Joys, Snickers, Butterfingers, and Hershey Bars. Woe betide any house that doled out one small Tootsie Roll. They were obviously cheap child-hating SOBs who should have their house TPed. (I plead Not Guilty.)

Some Halloween treats have been around for a while.  

Candy Corn

Candy Corn was supposedly invented by George Renninger in the late 1800s. It was designed to look like chicken feed since half of Americans worked on farms. By 1900, it was mass produced by the The Wunderle Candy Company of Philadelphia. There are no niblets in candy corn, but there is corn in the form of corn syrup. Nowadays, different colored candy corn can be found at Christmas, Easter, and Fourth of July. I consider them a sacrilege. There are also a plethora of candy corn flavored ales on the market. If you drink enough you can forget the entire candy corn debacle. 

Apples

Although not technically a treat (let’s face it, they’re too healthy), they’re also associated with Halloween. Celtic folk used them for divination, so did early Americans bobbing for apples. Whoever snagged an apple from a big bucket filled with water, hands tied behind the back, would wed soonest. Whoever didn’t, drowned, and got his candy stolen. If you didn’t die from apple bobbing, there were Snap Apple Night parties. An apple was jammed into one end of a suspended stick with a lit candle at the other end. Participants tried to take a bite of the apple while the stick was spun around. Winners got a bite of apple, losers set their hair on fire. A forgotten hero of Halloween is Kraft Foods employee Dan Walker or as I refer to him, Saint Dan. In the 1950s he elevated the mundane apple to candy nirvana. While experimenting with excess caramels from Halloween sales, he melted them down and added apples. Ta-da. Vito Raimondi of Chicago, Illinois also deserves an honorable mention. He patented the first automated caramel apple machine in 1960.

 

The worst Halloween candies.

(Doling out these is tantamount to child abuse.)

 

Twizzlers: Technically, they aren’t a candy, but solidified wallpaper paste.

Hot Tamales: Wallpaper paste flavored with cinnamon.

Necco Wafers: Wallpaper paste scraped from the shoes of employees at the wallpaper factory and pressed into disks to punish children.

Life Savers: The worlds most boring candy, also dangerous to your mental health because they prompted the Aussies to make a flavor called musk, not to be confused with musk sticks which, apparently they also savor. Both are equally disturbing.

Dots: The only thing they’re good for is to freeze them and use them as ammo in blow pipes.

Circus Peanuts: Seriously, who eats these? I once owned a dog that ate everything including cat poop from the litter box and he buried Circus Peanuts in the backyard.

Tootsie Rolls: Only if you want to be known as the cheapskate of the neighborhood and have your house TPed. (I plead Not Guilty again.) 

Serious about trick-or-treating and want to make tracks to the state that doles out the best candy? Check out this  interactive map from CandyStore.com

  

Bad Kitty. Why are Cats Evil?

  

Bad Kitty

 

Halloween is in a few days, but I’ve been seeing black cat decorations for over a month. They’re ubiquitous with Halloween as witches’ familiars, but what’s the deal with cats? How did something so cute and fuzzy get such a sketchy reputation. It wasn’t always the case.

 Cats in myth

Cats have been part of humans’ lives for a long time. The earliest mythological symbolism of animal deities occurred as long ago as Upper Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, a period extending from 35,000 to 8300 BC. The oldest known animal-shaped sculpture is a lion-headed, human-bodied figurine known as Löwenmensch, found in Hohlenstein Stadel cave in Germany. The statue dates from about 32,000 BC and was carved from mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. In these early religions, lion-headed figurines have been found that are believed to have played a prominent role in spiritualism and not associated with evil shenanigans. Ancient legends from Thailand, Burma, and other Asian countries, have cats transporting the souls of monks or royalty to heaven after death.

In Egypt, Bast or Bastet first appeared as a fierce lioness in the third millennium BCE, but after the domestication of the cat around 1500 BCE quickly morphed into a benign cat goddess, taking care of the family, house, and home. The Egyptian word for cat was ‘miu’ which sound like the noise a cat makes and I think is absolutely adorable. Cats shown on tomb walls and funerary stelae often depict them as beloved pets, seated by their owners’ chairs. According to Herodotus, when a cat died by a natural death, those who dwelled in the house shaved their eyebrows, which is just plain weird. Some cats were even mummified and afforded special burials with elaborately carved sarcophagi inscribed with their name. Even in the afterlife, an Egyptian wanted his or her kitty near.

One reasons why cats have a mystical connection may be because they are the only wild animal that domesticated themselves. As humans moved from the lives of hunter-gatherers to farm-based existence, cooperation with humans proved to be a mutually beneficial partnership. Cats got a reliable source of prey hunting vermin that fed on grain and humans got effortless pest control.

So why the bad rap?

Blame the Christians. They wanted to do away with anything that smacked of pagan worship so cat gods were out, even if they were helpful. As Christianity spread from the Middle East, so did myths surrounding cats. By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, cats got the reputation of sinister beasts with powers similar to witches and warlocks, obviously in cahoots with Satan. It was believed a cat’s bite was poisonous, as was its flesh, and a person who inhaled a cat’s breath would be infected with tuberculosis. Also, they could make beer go sour if you ticked them off. Yeah, that’s weird, too.

Cats can also make you sneeze. Cat allergens are twice as common as dog allergens. In the 14^th century, bubonic plague swept the European continent. In some regions, it killed sixty percent of the population. Since there was no understanding of sickness, any great evil was assumed to be the work of the devil, and the belief spread the plague was brought on by his feline minions. Thousands were killed, but cats got their revenge since the real culprit was fleas that feasted on rats and without cats to curb the rat population, the disease ravaged human populations.

Modern Creepy Cats

Since the Middle Ages, the cat’s reputation continued to improve until Hollywood got their paws on it to keep the spooky reputation alive. Cats serve as the primary source of terror in more than thirty films, from 1934’s The Black Cat to the 2019 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. There’s even a subgenre in movies known as the Lewton Bus, Cat Scare, or the Spring-Loaded Cat. This is where a cat jumps out of nowhere scaring the bejesus out of a poor schlub. It’s so common that it’s now a horror parody. (Check out “It’s Just a Cat” on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp_8h-AbQ98 )

So What’s the Deal with Cats?

They can be kind of scary. They’re fierce hunters, a bit standoffish, see in the dark, their eyes glow and they’re not obsequious like dogs. They won’t slobber all over you in paroxysms of delight when you walk in the door. You might get a little ankle rub, but all they’re really doing is marking you as their territory with the scent glands in their cheeks. They own you and they know it. Be nice or they’ll kill you in your sleep.

 

 

 

You Don't Know Jack (About Jack O'Lanterns, Stingy Jack, and Spring-heeled Jack)

Halloween is right around the corner, so what better time to explore the legend of the jack o’lantern. Good old Jack has had a long history and you may be surprise to learn originally the term didn’t refer to a vegetable at all. Jack was an all-purpose term, like “bub” or “fella”, use to denote a man. A night watchman who carried a torch or lantern at night was called a Jack o’lantern or “the guy with the lantern”. In the days before electricity, lights at night were creepy especially when they mysteriously appeared over bogs, swamps, or marshes—places where no living being in their right mind wandered at night. Caused by ignited gases from decomposing plant matter, these ghost lights had a variety of names; hinkypunks, corpse candles, fairy lights, will-o'-the-wisps, fool's fire, and good old jack o’lantern. Lacking a scientific explanation, people told stories to explain their appearance. In Ireland, they often revolved Stingy Jack.

Stingy Jack lived up to his name. The legend goes he invited the Devil to a local pub for a few rounds and wheedled the Devil to turn into a coin so neither would have to pay. Jack put the Devil into his pocket next to a silver cross so he couldn’t change back into his demonic form. He freed the Devil only after a promise that when Jack died he wouldn’t claim his soul.

When Jack finally kicked the bucket, God refused entry into heaven for such an unsavory character. Frankly, I don’t get God’s reasoning in this. It seems to me The Almighty should have gotten a big kick out of how Jack tricked the Devil, but there’s no arguing with the divine. The Devil had already promised not to claim Jack’s soul so the poor guy was dumped back on Earth, a wandering spirit with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming ever since. Thus Jack of the Lantern or Jack O’Lantern was born.

On All Soul’s Eve, wandering spirits such as Jack were supposed to be particularly frisky, playing tricks and causing mischief. Making vegetable lanterns was a tradition of the British Isles, and carved-out turnips, beets, and potatoes were stuffed with coal, wood embers, or candles as impromptu lanterns to celebrate the fall harvest. Children would sometimes wander off the road with a glowing vegetable to trick people into thinking Stingy Jack or another lost soul was watching. People began carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten Jack and his cohorts away.

Stingy Jack wasn’t the only Jack to cause trouble though. A wraith called Spring-Heeled Jack first started to appear in 1837. Residents of London began to report bizarre harassment from a ghost, imp or devil apparition in the shape of a large white bull. The strange figure would ring a doorbell and then ravage the clothes of the person who answered. Sometimes he simply ambushed people out walking. He was an athletic fellow, capable of scaling walls and jumping across rooftops. Thus, the spring heels. He often appeared in different guises such as a ghost, a bear, or devil or wearing red shoes or armor. The idea of costumes began to be linked to an apparition named Jack who like to play tricks on unsuspecting souls.

Immigrants from the British Isles brought the legend of Stingy Jack and Spring-heeled Jack with them, along with the custom of carving marrows and tuber and lighting them with candles. Pumpkins were plentiful in the fall and made even better jack o’-lanterns with large surfaces perfect for carving. The two Jack merged and brought the pumpkin with them and combined with local harvest festival traditions. Soon All Hallows Eve became the day to carve crude faces into pumpkins to frighten wandering spirits away. It was only a hop, skip, and a boo from there to our modern custom of exacting tribute from perfect strangers to keep the Jack and his ghostly companions from our doors.