Sugary Salvation: A Review of the Candies that Define Halloween
Graphic by Caleb Boyce
It’s Halloween, and you’re on your way home after a laborious night of trick-or-treating. Your costume is getting itchy, and your patience is running thin after being asked for the fourth time why a “grown-ass man,” such as yourself, looks like a “walking stop sign” in your rendition of the Red Line. Right now, climbing the stairs to your room seems an impossible feat. The only thing keeping you going is the promise of the imminent sugary salvation you’ve fought tooth and nail for all night, and you’re not going to let your night be ruined by a poor selection of Halloween candy.
You plunge your hand into your treasure trove and your fingers curl around the first thing they find: the distinct yellow box of Sour Patch Kids Zombies, with purple and orange flavors to match the Halloween spirit. You rip into the box and bite the head off of a purple zombie; tongue swirling and lips puckering as you lick off every bit of the wonderfully sour coating. As you chew through the zombie, the sweet grape flavor begins to kick in, albeit a little too strongly for your liking. You prefer the acidity of the outer coating but gladly welcome the sugary insides in this time of despair; all that matters is activating the receptors to trigger a flood of dopamine through your body. Overall, not a terrible outcome for your first pick. You can do better, but it’s a promising start.
Plastic rustles as you select your next choice of the night. Your eyes glance at the purple packaging, and you look away in denial. “Surely those aren’t what I think they are,” you wonder, fully knowing that they are, in fact, what you think they are: a bag of Ghost Peeps. You feel obliged to at least try one, so you pry the gooey ghosts apart from each other and wince as you place one into your mouth. As you work your way through the tough yet chewy exterior, bits of the Peeps get stuck in your teeth. The flavor—if it can even be called that—is crude and unforgiving. Spitting out the rest of the Peep, you curse at Just Born, Inc. for creating such awful candy, and you never look back.
After a glass of water to cleanse your mouth from those cursed Peeps, your impatience gives in, and you look into the bag. You scrounge around for the Reese’s you accumulated throughout the night, a choice you know won’t disappoint. It is an uncharacteristically warm October night, so the Reese’s have melted slightly in the bag. You don’t care. You rip one open and push the solid pieces into your mouth, cleaning up the melted chocolate stuck on the wrapper with your tongue and licking every last bit off your fingers. It’s everything you wanted and more. You appreciate that the bats—though slightly deformed—are thematically on-point, though not too lifelike (because who wants to eat bats, that’s so 2020). More importantly, you love the interplay between the sweet chocolatey outer layer and the nutty inner fillings, which is sweet but not mind-numbingly so. Though it took a couple of attempts to get here, you’re glad to finally enjoy your favorite.
After the rush from having a Reese’s (more like two or three of them) subsides, you’re ready to jump back into the bag. This time, you pull out a White Chocolate Kit Kat, a flavor you are not well acquainted with but are willing to give a chance. You separate the two halves and bite into the first one with a satisfying crunch. You aren’t the biggest fan of white chocolate: after eating an entire bag of white chocolate in one sitting a few Halloweens ago, the subsequent dizziness and stomach pain motivated you to abstain entirely. Until now. The combination of white chocolate and crunchy wafer is unique and exciting. You don’t mind the white chocolate, and in fact, like the balance it provides after the milk chocolate extravaganza from the Reese’s you just devoured. It’s a pleasant surprise, and you know you’ll be revisiting this treat in the future.
It wouldn’t truly be Halloween if you didn’t sample some candy corn of dubious origins before the end of the night. Candy corn is one of those Halloween staples that has somehow persisted for years, despite being seemingly inedible. You scoop up a handful that fell to the bottom of the bag, trying to be optimistic and open-minded about the mysterious candy. You start munching on a few of them, feeling the waxy outer layer peel away to reveal a granular inside. The candy corn tastes stale and off-putting, forcing you to chew faster to get them down. There are no two ways about it: candy corn is not fit for human consumption. Yet, in comparison to the aforementioned Ghost Peeps, they seem like divine ambrosia. How ridiculous is that?!
By this point, your head is throbbing and you feel dizzy, perhaps due to recalling the horrific Ghost Peeps, or more likely the consequences of eating a full bag of Halloween candy in one sitting. Either way, you’ve had enough candy to last a whole year, but that’s what makes Halloween so special.
There is no other time of the year when gorging on heaps of candy that have been awarded to you strictly based on your appearance is socially acceptable, let alone so vigorously encouraged. Sure, by the end of the night you’ll be left feeling sick and wanting to never look at a piece of candy again—except maybe a Reese’s, you can never have enough of those. Yet, you consistently celebrate Halloween because digging through a bag of candy looking for your favorites offers a momentary feeling of liberation, no matter how ridiculous you’ll feel afterward.
Zaid Al-Ississ ’28 (zalississ@college.harvard.edu) will be permanently blacklisting any house that offers him Ghost Peeps this Halloween.