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The Aftermath Posting Date: Nov 2 2008 6:53PM My tummy hurts. My teeth are rotting. My pillows don’t have pillowcases.
Must be the day after Hallowe’en.
My candy is sorted into five piles. There’s the A-List pile which consists only of the Big Name candies – Snickers, Mars, m&m’s, Oh Henry, Nibs, Twizzlers, Caramilk, Aero, Twix and anything from the Hershey’s family. These are your elite candies, without question.
The B-List pile is everything else from the major-market candy segment. Here is where you find what are, to my mind, the lesser chocolate bars and such. This is where the Wunderbars and the Crispy Crunches go, along with Smarties (really just m&m’s for the uneducated palette), anything Reese’s and pretty much candy with fruit flavouring – Swedish berries, for example, or perhaps Mike and Ikes.
Basically, you can close your eyes, grab anything from one of those two piles and know that you’re in for a solid candy experience. The reason for the two piles is that you always want to make sure you finish the B-List pile before you finish the A-List pile because you never want to get yourself into a situation where you’re down to your last piece of Hallowe’en candy and it’s a Crispy Crunch. That’s just bad planning.
Next up, the C-List pile which is reserved for anything that comes in a twist wrapper. This includes Tootsie pops (the most overrated candy of all time), those fake caramel-ish things with the Hallowe’en theme, mints and the entire sub-species of Rockets and their derivatives. If you have to pull both ends of a candy wrapper to get at whatever’s inside, you are in for a big disappointment.
The D-List pile is where you put your savouries. It’s always a little sad when you go trick-or-treating and scoop a savoury. Hallowe’en is about candy. It’s about sugar. It’s about stickiness and sweetness and hyperglycemic comas. It’s not about salt. I repeat … Hallowe’en is not about salt. Do not hand out potato chips, pretzels, peanuts, popcorn or bacon. All of these items go in the D-List pile. Anything that looks good on a bar next to a pint of lager should not be in a Hallowe’en sack. Should be a law.
Under desperate circumstances, like when you get to Remembrance Day and you have nothing else left to remind you of the sheer joy of collecting and eating 72 pounds of candy, you are allowed to go into piles C and D, as long as you remember to save at least one piece from the A-List.
Then there’s the E-List pile.
The E-List pile is where the Hallowe’en spirit goes to die. On the E-List you find fruit, toothbrushes, homemade items with War Amps return address labels on them, granola bars, boxed raisins (which I know are technically fruit, but deserve their own category because they are worse than fruit … they are fruit with all the water taken out), Zip-loc bags with carrot sticks and celery, and anything that could be disguising a razor blade or carrying deadly poison.
In a nutshell, if I were to describe the criteria for landing a Hallowe’en item in the E-List pile, it would be anything that is either good for you or could kill you. Seriously, if you’re trying to either kill small children dressed as Dr. Seuss characters and superheroes, or improve their cholesterol count, you’re sick … very, very sick.
If I or anyone under the age of twelve win the election on November 4th and become supreme commander of universe and all its constituent parts, you can bet your bottom dollar that one of the first points on the legislative agenda will be banning anything from the C-List, D-List or E-List from being distributed on Hallowe’en. In fact, if I sweep into power with a nice solid majority, I may just use my electoral popularity to push through a ban on the B-List as well. There’s no sense in governing in half-measures.
Hallowe’en as we know it is under attack. You either distribute from the A-List or you are against us. House that distribute from the A-List are the Coalition of the Willing. Every other house is my enemy.
Vote for me. |
