The Smarties House

I took advantage of the nice weather today and took down my Halloween decorations. It was a bittersweet moment, because I really, really like Halloween, and it also reminded me that we're now a week into November, which only serves to cause me to freak out over the rapid passage of time. But while I was tearing down fake webs and packing away purple lights and plastic skulls, I started reflecting on some stuff.

I had a good turnout on Halloween this year. I don’t know if it was because Halloween fell on a Friday night or if it was because word is finally getting out that people actually live on my street (there are only six houses on it, and if you blink while driving past, you’ll miss it), but I actually ran out of candy this year. Naturally, I’d helped myself to some of it beforehand, but I was still looking forward to having some left over. It was good candy! I always give out good candy, and this is why:

Halloween has traditionally been my favorite holiday (after Christmas, of course). From the time I was born until my 12th birthday or so, my mother would browse the patterns in the fabric store, and whip up some elaborate costume that would put all the other mothers to shame. No store-bought masks here, no cheap plastic capes. No pre-fab, pre-packaged ensembles for me. Everything was sewn and tailored to size, and my makeup was applied with fastidious attention to detail. I was amazed at some of the stuff she would come up with.

I can’t sew to save my life – never could – but I am a creative, so at least I know where my crafty genes came from. They certainly didn’t come from my father who, despite his best efforts to appear handy, was not exactly Bob Vila. On Halloween, his job was to take us out trick-or-treating while my mother handed out the candy at our house.

If there was one thing you didn’t want to be on Halloween, it was the house that gave out shitty candy. I grew up in such a house. As if my childhood weren’t already fraught with bullying and relentless teasing by every kid in existence, I was forced to endure the stigma of being a resident of the ”Smarties House.” Every street has one, as well as the “Bit-O-Honey House,” the “Stale Gumball House,” and the worst offender of all, the “Religious Tract House.” In fact I think the Smarties people are only one step above the “Are You SAVED?” whack-jobs. I mean, come on. Kids are coming to your door dressed as goblins and hobos and Star Wars characters with bags bursting at the seams with stuff that’s going to wind them up and drive their parents crazy later, and you’re going to drop a folded piece of paper in their bag? And a folded piece of paper that tells them they’re going to hell for crimes such as…gluttony? Then the next house drops in a narrow little tube of compressed sugar pellets that taste like sweetened colored chalk…it’s really enough to drive a kid off the edge. Or at least enough to give the offspring of said house a beatdown on the bus the next day.

Surely it needs no explanation, but look: nobody likes Smarties. Nobody. Anyone who says they do is lying, and is more than likely a sugar addict who has a stash of old Smarties in the cupboard for those emergencies when no other sugar is available. Much like an alcoholic will drink mouthwash to get a buzz on in his most desperate moments, so will a sugar junkie eat Smarties at his lowest point.

Smarties are nasty. Smarties are cheap. And Smarties are made of God-knows-what. In this day and age, they’re probably made, like everything else, with Melamine. But on second thought, they’re probably not even made anymore. The Smarties being sold today are probably the same Smarties that my mother bought in 1979, dusted off a little and repackaged to look fresh.

“But Mom, you DON’T understand!” I would wail as I watched her bust out the big bag of Smarties every year. “I’m gonna get killed!”

She’d flash her trademark look of disdain and disbelief, roll her eyes, and say, “Did you get killed last year? Or the year before that? Or any of the years before that? No? Then knock it off. Smarties are all we can afford.”

I wanted to call bullshit on this so many times, since how much more expensive could the good stuff be? I mean, if the Rudnickis with their nine kids and rusted-out 1966 Dart Swinger could afford to give out bite-size Snickers, then how was it we couldn’t afford to give out at least Mallo Cups or something? What about Tootsie Rolls? They weren’t chocolate, but at least they were flavored like chocolate, so they were still higher on the candy chain than fucking Smarties. It didn’t matter; arguing with the woman was pointless, as I would discover over the eighteen years I lived under her roof. And yes, I did consider that maybe we couldn't afford better candy because all our money went to making those awesome costumes, but we often recycled the costumes, since my sister could usually fit into something I'd worn a few years prior, so technically my mother was only making one costume most years. And then when we got older and started making our own costumes out of thrift-store finds and old sporting goods, there was virtually no money coming out of the candy fund for them. So I stand my ground in proclaiming my mother's statement total baloney.

So off into the dusk I would trundle with my giant plastic handle-bag and my elaborate home-made costume, cursing my mother under my breath, and praying that Scott Oxendine and his posse would go easy on me this year. Anyone who’s ever disputed that whole “sins of thy fathers” stuff was never a chunky, pig-nosed loser whose mother who gave out Smarties on Halloween, because they would understand the validity of that statement, and how the sin of my mother’s Smarties distribution would be visited upon me many times over by way of lunchbox keep-away, hat-snatching, and other bullying tactics of your average 10-year-old.

I would come home from trick-or-treating and dump my bag out in the middle of the living room. My sister and I would trade each other for stuff we liked more, and my parents would casually pick through the pile looking for razor blades, pins, and hits of acid mixed in with the Reeses’ cups and Kit-Kats and mini-pamphlets adorned with photos of clouds being pierced by sunbeams. Occasionally they’d find a piece of candy that was open – more likely the result of having 30 pounds of pressure applied from the other candy in the bag than a nefariously-placed instrument of torture. But no razor blades, which was actually kind of disappointing. I could have used a razor-infused Milky Way on the bus.

We had various things we liked to do with the candy we didn’t want. Sometimes my dad would take the gumballs or the caramels, and my mom would always take the Sugar Daddies. One year my sister and I made an entire chain of Bit-O-Honeys and Mary Jane Candies by pressing them together end-to-end and stuck it around the perimeter of our bedroom, much to my mother’s chagrin (we never imagined it would take the paint off when we took it down). But after all was said and done, you can take a wild guess where our Smarties ended up.

Trick or Treat!