Blog - 11/08/08 - Happy Halloween
Another Halloween has come and gone. We went out and bought three “fun size” bags of candy to prepare for the trick-or-treaters who would be coming to our apartment. Our kids went out and rounded up about six pounds of candy between the two of them. The trick-or-treater traffic was light so at the end of the night we had about a pound and half of candy leftover which we added to the kid’s six pounds.
We gave our two-year-old a mini snicker bar and fifteen minutes later he vomited his entire dinner onto our living room couch, the cushion on the couch and the living room carpet. When our eight-year-old eats even a little corner of a candy bar the high concentration of sugar makes him hyperactive and unmanageable. Of course, correlation need not imply causation, but I felt that the best course of action was to confiscate the candy and ration it out to the kids over the next few weeks.
So what winds up happening is that I personally have to eat 95% of the seven and a half pounds of candy. I’m not particularly good at eating candy in moderation and most of the candy has high fructose corn syrup in it. The first two or three weeks of November is the time of year when I consume about 20 times the amount of high fructose corn syrup that I normally eat. Stomach aches, heart burn and indigestion are common symptoms of Halloween.
And another problem with Halloween is that “fun size” candy is not fun at all. In fact it’s frustrating. If you buy a candy bar in its regular size from a vending machine you usually eat the whole candy bar and stop eating the candy after that one serving. However, after eating one piece of fun size candy you’re usually not satisfied, but you have a whole bag of fun size candy that you can keep digging into so you have another and another and after eating the equivalent of three and half regular size candy bars, you finally stop with a feeling of helplessness because you acknowledge that you’re unable to control your insatiable desire to consume candy.
This is an example of dishonest and misleading marketing on the part of food corporations who are always searching for devious new ways to get innocent people to disregard the risks of obesity and diabetes and increase their purchase and consumption of candy because the more people they get addicted to their high fructose corn syrup candy the more profitable they become.
It is fun for kids to think up creative costumes and dress up in them, it's fun to carve jack-o-lanterns and display them at night with candles in them, and it's fun for kids to have a little candy, but Halloween is becoming too commercial resulting in enormous quantities of per capita candy consumption and exaggerated decorations. The trick to having a happy Halloween is to know when to pitch the excess treats into the garbage.