Candy &Treats
CANDY & TREATS | TRICKS & PRANKS
Every year there'd be the same old angst about the most efficient candy carrying device - a plastic pumpkin with a handle? a decorated shopping bag? one of those commercial trick or treat bags? a pillow case etc. After a particularly large candy haul one Halloween, we were all trying to squeeze in a few more streets of Trick or Treating before the mothers came after us, when ... my bag broke and the hard earned candy treasure was scattered over the street ... other kids were grabbing MY candy!!! The shock, the tragedy, the tears ... For years after that fiasco, I always opted for the dependable strength of the pillow case
As soon as we got home, we'd dump out our bags on the living room floor and start sorting our candy into piles of 'most favorite', 'pretty good', 'etc' on down to the 'least desirable' pile. Or sometimes the sorting was done according to candy types: the 'chocolate' pile (divided into subcategories of with or without nuts, dark or milk chocolate); the 'lollipops' including the teensy dum-dums; the 'chewables' including gum; 'hard candy & candy corn'; 'penny candy' and then the apples or homemade cookie piles. Now the serious horse trading began as we tried to amass as many of our favorites as possible. Personally, I'd trade anything to get as much chocolate in my possession as I could. Anyone watching us kids woulda thought "Isn't that cute how they're bargaining" - but WE weren't thinking that way - at all! This was big.
The Candyland board game was designed in the 1940s by Eleanor Abbott, while she was recovering from polio. Milton Bradley Co.bought the game and first published it in 1949.
If you ever lived near a bakery or chocolate factory, you might know the smell of heaven. Rich grew up in Dorchester, a few miles from The Baker's Chocolate factory - Most days it was forgotten. But there were certain days, when the wind would change before a rainstorm that the smell of chocolate would drift down the hill on Wilmington Avenue and the effect was quite uplifting. A similar experience would occur when Rich & Flo visited Rich's parents' store when the bakery on the block was baking brownies.
Recently a book about The Baker Chocolate company was published - The Baker Chocolate Company (MA): A Sweet History (Regional Histories) by Anthony M. Sammarco
The Baker Chocolate Company (MA): A Sweet History (Regional Histories) by Anthony M. Sammarco
2009 The Mars Co. (maker of Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Way etc.) worked out a deal with the Rainforest Alliance, promising to buy only certified sustainably grown cocoa, phasing iin by 2020. To understand the significance, consider that cocoa is grown in the tropics, wehere poor farmers raze rainforests to plant cocoa trees. Without the shade of the old forest canopy, the temperature rises and erosion increases, whil water becomes scarcer. Sustainable cocoa farms leave forests intact - improving habitat & biodiversity (source NRDC Onearth Magazine)