Top Five Most Disappointing Candy
Top 5 Most Disappointing Candy
Every kid loves candy and quite a few adults as well. What parent hasn’t filched from their child’s Halloween stash while they were sleeping. I mean they don’t really need all that sugar. You’re doing them a favor really. And when they notice the big candy bar missing, it teaches them how to deal with loss.
But kids don’t like every kind of candy and those dislikes stay with us into adulthood. Herein is my list of the 5 candies I found most disappointing.
5. Circus Peanuts - Look, they’re orange, shouldn’t they taste like orange for crying out loud?? Who hasn’t bit into one for the first time and thought either “That’s not what I expected, but it’s kind of yummy” or “Ewww, that’s not what I expected.” I’m afraid I’m part of the Ewww crowd. Considering the taste and the texture, I’m thinking this is an industrial byproduct that was somehow found to be edible.
4. Caramels – They look good. Smell good. Taste good. But all that goodness goes away in the terror that you’re going to spit out the brown square with some of your teeth still embedded in it. When I tried to eat one for the first time, I knew what all the other kids meant when they talked about Lockjaw. I don’t know why that was such a popular topic when I was a kid. Maybe because Tetanus was always an ever present threat because too many of our dads thought the backyard was a good place to put lumber with nails sticking out of it.
3. Peeps – It’s Easter time. The most holy day in Christendom. Shouldn’t Easter candy be a little more special than Peeps? Shouldn’t a Peep be more than just a big marshmallow with a nasty sugar coating? On the other hand, it was hilarious the first year we put them in the microwave. One wonders what the deal is with all the candy on Easter any way? Perhaps it’s an attempt to make our children understand the suffering of Christ via painful trips to the dentist.
2. Giant Lollipop - We were at Disney World this past February and visited the candy shop that was cleverly situated near the entrance of the park. We decided to let our kids pick something out, but my wife tried hard to dissuade our oldest daughter from the object of her desire because my wife too understands the hollow promise of the giant lollipop. I remember the same disappointment. I fell victim to its allure a couple of times. It was never as good as it looked and I got thoroughly sick and tired of it. I didn’t want to give up on it, but sinking more effort into it only made it more disgusting. You couldn’t eat it all at once and saving it only turned it into a magnet for dust, hair, and other debris. So then you had to rinse it off and suddenly you have a not very fun craft project. Sigh. We see a common theme here: It looked good, wasn’t good. Don’t you wish this lesson followed you through life… maybe in the form of a giant lollipop that whacked you in the back of the head when you were about to make a decision based on appearance. There are a lot of people who bought Ford Mustangs in the late 80’s who wish the giant lollipop had been there to say “Whack! Don’t buy it you idiot. It’s a crap car now. They’re just capitalizing on the name.” There are guys wishing the giant lollipop had been there when they started dating the prettiest girl on campus. “Whack. She’s going to sleep with your best friend and your favorite mechanic.” Sigh.
1. Cotton Candy - I saw it for the first time at Scout-o-Rama. To my 10 year old self, it looked wonderful. It was colorful. It was fluffy. It was candy! But I didn’t have the quarter it would take to make my dream purchase. I had fifteen cents. And then there it was on the concrete floor of the convention center: a thin, shiny dime! I carried my loot in my sweaty little hand to the cotton candy vendor and nervously bought my first and last cotton candy. The first thing I found out was that that crap is sticky. The second thing was that it immediately melted into a hard lump of disgusting sugar that you didn’t want to suck on but wasn’t quite chewable. I don’t know what I was thinking it would taste like, but it wasn’t that. Not the last time I threw good money away on something stupid and useless, but painful nonetheless.
There you have it folks. A listing of my confectionary bad experiences. And if you get anything out of this at all, I hope you learn the lesson of the giant lollipop.
