Piggies

Grunt, snort-snort-snort-snort-snort, gasp, wheeze, slurp, chomp, oink, squeal! Too bad I didn’t take a movie so I could have captured both sight and sound. I’m telling you these pigs were eating with very audible gusto! I think this photo is the perfect metaphor for the way I felt about Halloween when I was a kid. It was the only time of year when I was free to amass as much candy as I possibly could, and you’d better believe I behaved in a fairly swine-like manner, since sweets of all descriptions were pretty much banned every other day of the year.

I recall trying to gobble down as much of the “good candy” (Hershey bars, Nestle Crunch, Snickers, M&Ms, Milky Ways—basically anything chocolate [with the exception of Tootsie Rolls {ick!}])—while still “out in the field.” Once we got home, our bags of candy were weighed (not sure why) and cached in a kitchen cupboard well out of our reach (supposedly). One piece of candy per day was doled out to us by our prison warden mom. It was a minimum-security prison, though, so we did get to choose which piece of candy would be our daily ration.

That meant, of course, that we still had stale, uneaten Halloween candy in February (for crissake!), but only the “gross candy”—those awful orange-and-black peanut butter kisses, Bit-O-Honeys, Mary Janes, sourballs, Bazooka Joe bubble gum. I’m cringing now just thinking about those poor excuses for candy. Who likes them?