Christmas Reflections: Three

The Candy Counter

Candy came in seasonal waves. Some stayed around all year: assorted gum-drops, orange slices, peppermint and wintergreen lozenges, coconut bon-bons and haystacks, Boston baked beans, and redhots, for example. Those were fairly stable, not melting when the weather got hot. (Most of the five-and-tens were not air-conditioned. That luxury was reserved for a few restaurants and drugstores in the 1950s.) Though some chocolate candy hung around all summer, very little was sold.

Who wanted chocolate in the summer? It would melt before you could eat it. And then there were the worms. Sometimes I'd defy the odds and buy a Hershey's bar in July because I was craving chocolate (yes, the addiction started early). After all, it was well-wrapped in that silver foil. Surely it was okay. But it wasn't okay. It was discolored, and there were tiny worms wriggling and gnawing their way through the bar. Mama said that the worm eggs were always in the chocolate, that they waited for hot weather to hatch.

Come October, all of that changed. The clerks knew the little girl who lived up over McShurley's Shoe Store and the Coffee Shop, and they knew why I kept an eye on the candy counter.

"Sharon Kay, chocolate candy came in today."

"Really? Did you get the maple nut clusters?" Those were Mama's favorites. We didn't buy them often, because they were sixty-nine cents a pound, more than twice as much as a pound of orange slices, but when they showed up in the sparkling glass bin, I would go searching for empty soda pop bottles. If I could find eighteen, I would get thirty-six cents when I redeemed them at the A & P. That was enough for half a pound of maple nut clusters.

Then came Christmas. Forget chocolate! The French creams had arrived. They were so fresh that the sugar shells on the outside had hardly hardened. The inside would eventually stiffen to stone, but right now it was soft. Some were fruit-flavored, while others tasted almost floral, like an elegant, edible perfume.

Along with the French creams came the Christmas hard candies. My favorites were the filled ones: black-walnut pillows, candy raspberries, and chocolate-filled straws. While I always loved the colors and intricacies of of the ribbon candy, I never bought it, deciding that it would be too much of a challenge to eat.

Most of the time, I feasted on the sweets only with my eyes, but occasionally Mama would give me a dime or I'd skimp on lunch to have a nickel for a bit of candy. It helped us to make it through our temporary poverty.