Whatever Happened to Mary Janes? (And Other Halloween Laments)

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

That's what the poet asks. My question is: Where are the Sno-Caps?

Remember? Those little chocolate chips covered with pellets of sugar the exact size of cavities? They'd get in there and hibernate for the winter. Still, I miss them this time of year because it feels as if Halloween candy increasingly is narrowcast.

It's not that Sno-Caps aren't available at all. What I mean is you go to the store for this most perfect of holidays, and it seems as if Hershey's and Mars have cornered the market almost completely. You've got your mini Snickers, your mini M&M's and your brand extensions of Reese's cups, which include everything from sticks to bars to, I don't know, Reese's Peanut Butter Jerky. And while I love all these, of course, I remember hauling home a bag of candy as a kid that was much more full of surprises — good and bad.

There were always, for instance, a disheartening number of Mary Janes. I know Mary Janes are still around, but my kids never bring them home (and I should know because I paw through their candy every night when they're asleep). Time was, Mary Janes would appear at Halloween and, seemingly, only at Halloween, small lozenges of an un-chewable cross between caramel and taffy. In my mind, perhaps because of the era, they are a Soviet candy, the candy equivalent of the ruble — completely worthless outside the artificial economy created by the holiday. And there was that weird way that, if you were stupid enough to eat one, they always made you drool.

But at least they weren't the 9 millionth mini Milky Way.

Another candy seemingly grown scarce is the Charleston Chew.

My dad would steal those from me and freeze them. Now they're gone, and so is he. I miss his other favorite, too: the so-called "circus peanut" — a dull orange-colored marshmallow that had the peculiar quality of never being fresh. It was as if they came off the assembly line 6 months old.

Goodbye, too, to the off-brand, perfectly spherical M&M-like candy that came in little cellophane sleeves, and to the small packages of pumpkin seeds with an Indian on them, and to those caramel bull's-eyes that always seemed synonymous with sophistication — probably because my older sister liked them and I didn't. The suckers with loops of string for sticks are hard to find, too — maybe because someone finally realized they are just too disturbing. It always seemed as if they were designed to be yanked out of choking children's throats in the same manner that would yank a bathtub stopper out of a drain.

As for the wax lips and Pixy Stix of blessed memory, I know you can get these on nostalgia candy Web sites. I just can't get them in my kids' candy bags. I miss the convenience.

I guess I'm happy they'll be toting home candy at all in these health-obsessed days. When they're grown up, their kids probably will be toting home organic baby carrots, and they will find themselves pining for the mini Snickers of yesteryear. And, of course, the Reese's jerky.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at Advertising Age. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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