Candy is Dandy

I sat in a waiting room, waiting (duh!) for my appointment, and next to me on the table was a candy dish filled with Jolly Ranchers. I am very judgmental of candy dishes, in that special way I am about most everything. Only certain kinds of candy should be offered in them, and very few people seem to understand the art behind a good candy dish. The trick is seasonal and individually wrapped. Please share that with everybody. The one next to me, like most candy dishes, was only half right.

My in-laws always have a candy dish or two set out, filled with plain M&Ms. It never changes, M&Ms, day in, day out. My children cannot keep their hands out of it, and if I catch them sneaking from the one in the den, they just slip past me and hit the one on the kitchen counter. Those candy dishes are unsanitary, with everyone sticking their dirty mitts into the dish, touching all the candy shells of the other M&Ms as they help themselves to just one more.

Growing up, I had an elderly neighbor who always had a candy dish sitting out, filled with ribbon candy. One piece of ribbon candy. Due to the constant humidity of northeast Florida, any unwrapped candy always became one giant piece cemented together by sugar and moisture. A chisel would not have loosened up a hunk. Add to that the fact that she probably had that same candy sitting out for thirty years, and there was no way anyone’s hands or teeth (or in her case, dentures) were strong enough to break that ribbon candy down. The fact that the ribbon candy was older than me and inedible never stopped that old woman from offering it to me every time I went over there to look at her husband’s gnarled hands and milky cataracts, which fascinated me when I was eight and bored.

The idea of a communal candy dish in public is even more nauseating, as if the plastic spoon inserted into the jumble of multi colored butter mints actually keeps anyone from passing their E Coli and other unnamed diarrhea causing bacteria to the unsuspecting victims who were only trying to mask the garlic on their breath. One of my friends refers to these after dinner palate cleansers as “fecal mints”, and anytime I almost slip and grab a spoonful of sweet melt in your mouth mintiness, I remember what is tagging along on its way through my digestive tract.

Seasonal and individually wrapped. If it’s almost Easter, then things should be egg shaped and wrapped in brightly colored foil. Halloween and Christmas are easy, with the plethora of snack sized goodies in appropriate colors. And really, you can’t go wrong with something unusual, like Chinese Hello Kitty candies or Israeli candies you get from specialty stores. Everyone wants to try candy they never saw before. But no one wants to eat those pale blue mints and butterscotch discs your grandmother had in the hobnail milk glass dish on her coffee table. That goes double for starlight mints, which might be traditional, but show how cheap and unoriginal you really are.

I dug around in that candy dish next to me, looking for anything beyond the four Jolly Rancher flavors. Grape, watermelon, apple, and raspberry. I would never eat those, not even when I was a kid. Yuck. I saw a strawberry candy, wrapped in its cute strawberry cellophane, and passed that too. Those are only used for fillers in gift baskets from Swiss Colony. And finally, on the bottom, was a caramel Nip. Score!