Hard Candy

I am sucking on  a piece of hard candy as I write. Therefore, you are going to get a hard candy report. Every year at the beginning of November, a local grocery store sells bulk Christmas hard candy from bins. I love that kind of simple candy and bought a large amount of it the other day. Hard candy has been popular since as far back as the early 19th century. As a result of its popularity I think I should receive absolution for eating so much of it. Some of the earliest types of candies that were considered hard candies included lemon flavored candy drops and peppermint candy drops. But hard candy mixes now come in all kinds of flavors. That's why i pick out the flavors I most like when scooping it from those big bins.

I like most hard candy but hate the French style cream center hard candy. Putting cream inside a hard candy is like putting Melissa McCarty inside of Beyonce's swim suit. Yuk! I also do not like spicy or sour hard candy. My favorites are the sweetest flavors because...well..maybe I am sweet. Basically, hard candy is sugar, almost complete sugar made from a sweet syrup, with food coloring and flavors that are either natural oils or artificial. Before you lecture me on "all that sugar", remember that you probably eat hard candy when you have a cough or sore throat. Many medicines for those conditions are enrobed inside a hard candy. Face it, you would rather have your cough drops inside of sugar flavored hard candy than  instead being inside broccoli!

Did you know that hard candy is technically a glass, so much so that it is sometimes used to make the “bottle” that gets broken over someone's head in a fight scene. I'd rather suck on a hard candy than be hit over the head with one. But you probably want to break a hard candy over my head. I do think hard candy is a memory stimulus of sort at Christmas. Grown people (I do consider myself "grown") still love eating hard candy because it reminds them of their childhood hard candy Christmas times.

I read that although people in the United States consume only 2% of their calories from candy, they buy 600 million pounds of candy every year for Halloween alone. That's six times the weight of the Titanic. Even crazier, more than 30,000 people are employed by the candy industry in America. For such large candy numbers, it's still surprising Americans don't consume more candy. I hope my dentist won't what I wrote here....