Today at work, employees are bringing their kids in for the 4th Annual "Halloween Kids' Happy Hour". (Happy Hour continues for the adults later on after work). I am looking forward to seeing the little ones, most of whom are under the age of 4, toddling around in their costumes. They will be travelling from desk to desk, trick-or-treating and for this we will be given some candy to pass out. I had to tell operations though that they had best not leave me in charge of a bag of candy. This is because with regards to candy, unlike most other things in my life, I have no self control. Restaurant desserts rarely entice me. I am not a fiend for cake or baked goods. I have eaten enough leftover wedding cake from my parents' restaurant to never be tempted by a bakery cake. Give me a good chocolate bar or a bagful of gummy candy any day.
When I received gifts of candy in college, I would ask my roommates to please hide them in their rooms someplace. Each evening after dinner I would be allotted one chocolate covered cherry or three Hershey Kisses. Left to my own devices, I would eat an entire bag or box and feel surprisingly very little guilt.
This is surely hereditary. As a first time trick-or-treater, in my blissful ignorance I left my Halloween candy out on the dining room table for a day and a half before I discovered that my stash was diminishing. In an incident that has now become infamous, I came into the kitchen crying that I had "lost my treats". It was at this point that my mother had to tell me that I had not lost them, but that my father had eaten them. That's right. He could not even keep himself from eating his toddler's candy. He still refers to it as 'the first loss of innocence'.
For this reason, we have not been a family that keeps a lot of candy or dessert in the house. My mother has made a small career of hiding these rare sweets from my father. My personal favorite was the time we heard him yell from the freezer: "Who put this big fish in front of the ice cream?!" (He has been known to eat an entire half gallon in one sitting). Even in recent years he has told me to keep my holiday gifts of candy hidden in my room someplace because he knows he will not go looking in there. If you do not know my father, you are probably picturing an obese man. It is only because of his exercise and hiking regime that he manages to stay trim.
For me, it is hard to know if it is pure heredity or if there is also this little thing of mystique and deprivation involved. My mother was convinced that not giving us a taste of candy would be the solution to the problem. For several years on Easter we were given stuffed bunnies and plastic Easter eggs instead of candy. One year I received a rocking chair. The first year my mom put white chocolate bunnies in our baskets my brother asked if it was soap. As a chocolate lover, my father was ashamed, but reportedly, I knew just what to do with it and immediately bit off its ear. A babysitter of mine only recently divulged that one time she gave me a piece of chocolate while my parents were away. After one bite I said "Reenie, what is this? It's gooooood."
And it's been downhill ever since. My mother also would not let me eat fruit roll-ups as a child because "they are bad for your teeth". In sixth grade I paid a girl in my class 25 cents every day for the single fruit roll-up that her parents packed in her lunch. She made bank because I was a desperate addict in need of a fix. When I went off to college, my first inclination was not to go out and get a bunch of booze but to buy an enormous case of fruit roll-ups. When I was an exchange student in England as a teenager I managed to survive on chocolate bars alone since nothing my host-mother prepared was edible. On my semester abroad in Rome, many times my roommates would watch me run screaming from the apartment to buy candy because it was 7:45 and the tabacchis were about to close. Nutella? I eat it plain with a spoon.
So this morning, when they came and passed out bags of treats for the kids, my co-worker took my share and put them in her drawer out of my reach.
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