03/14/2023: The Candy Trade

It's a long way until Halloween, but candy is universal, so I want to share some thoughts now. If you're like me, one of the great joys of Trick-or-Treating is not just going from house to house in your awesome costume. It's when you take inventory of your haul afterwards in your living room, bedroom, or wherever you feel comfortable spreading your collection in front of you like a dragon. I would do this with my little brother after a good evening of going around the neighborhood, and we'd sort out our candy for the most serious business of the evening: The Candy Trade.

See, not all candy is created equal. For every Kit-Kat, Hershey's Chocolate, Butterfinger, Snicker's, Tootsie Roll, Jolly Rancher, Double Bubble Gum, and Dum-Dum, there's a Three Musketeer, Red Vine, Sour Patch Kid, Milky Way, Almond Joy, or Mounds lurking in the bottom of the bag. Then you've got the oddballs: pretzels, candy corn, popcorn balls, Swedish Fish, and candy apples. I'm sure many of you reading this feel strongly on where I categorized some of the above, and I'm also sure that you're wondering where X, Y, and Z candy are -- why haven't I listed them? Where would they rank?

In college around Halloween, I would put out a Google Form for ranking Halloween candy, where each person would pick their top 5 and bottom 5 ranked candy, with write-ins allowed. I had around 45 candies in a drop-down list for people to pick from, and yet I would still get a large amount of write-ins, for both the top and bottom rankings, and it would often be a very diverse cast of candies that I hadn't even considered. I would ask for the approximate age of who was responding, since the survey included students, faculty, and staff, and I got a great range of answers. It was a fun personal project for me where I would analyze the data after the fact and post the results in a follow-up bulletin message.

Even years after Trick-or-Treating, people would have strong opinions on what candy they most wanted to see in their vicinity, whether that be in office candy jars, freebies on folding tables, or even for The Parent Tax when their kid(s) have gotten their loot. Generally speaking, it confirmed a few of my suspicions from my time as a professional kid: Dark chocolate is King in many people's minds, Milk chocolate is the runner-up, and White chocolate (my personal favorite) gets left at the bottom of the bag.

Which, of course, is excellent news for me.

While losing the popularity contest is a bit of a drag, it means that I can pawn off my Dark chocolate (which is Poison to me) in order to get heaps of White chocolate (my beloved). The people who prefer Dark chocolate are happy, as am I. Similarly, I can trade away my Almond Joys, Mounds, and Red Vines for lesser-considered candies, like DOTS, Swedish Fish, and candy corn. Oh, you're not going to have your pretzels or popcorn balls? Well, I know a pretty convenient place to keep them.

Now, different holidays have different candy-scapes. Christmas is hot cocoa and peppermint land, Easter is time for Peeps and chocolate bunnies, and if you're heading to one of my family's birthday parties, you better be ready for piñata mix. However, I would bet that a similar Candy Trade happens for each of them, just at a smaller scale. After you find all of the plastic Easter eggs with candy inside, why wouldn't you trade your hard earned hard candies with others? After the last of the piñata's bounty has been plundered, what's stopping you from comparing notes with your fellow partygoers?

The only exception to this that I can think of is Christmas, but that's because there's no competition to get the candy; it's all just there, and we shouldn't fight for some reason. You might make a list.

All of this to day, Happy Pi Day, even if I prefer cake.