When the Treat Is the Trick: Worst Halloween Candy From Back in the Day

When we were young the highlight of fall (you know, that season that used to occur between summer and winter) was Halloween. We'd all go trick-or-treating, unaccompanied by an adult, from the moment school let out until about 8 or 8:30 p.m. We’d easily cover at least 10 blocks, usually making a pit stop at home at least once to unburden ourselves of a full bag of loot before continuing our autumnal journey into the quickly approaching night (hoping that some adult in the house didn't confiscate the pick of the litter in our absence).

This annual haul of candy was always appreciated and anticipated, but not all of the treats bestowed by our neighbors were created equally. There were the “good” houses, the “special” houses, that handed out full-size candy bars and not the misleadingly named “fun size” Milky Ways or Snickers, whose very descriptor was an affront to our tween sensibilities. You could easily pick out the good houses: An aura seemed to surround them and you could almost hear angelic music coming from the front porch if you listened closely enough. These stops were our holy grails, our unicorns, but they were the exception rather than the rule.

Most houses gave out what we’d consider the normal stuff such as Smarties or Milk Duds or Dum-Dums or Almond Joys or candy corn. These were par for the course: expected, eaten, then forgotten. However, there was a third category besides unicorns or the normal that we so cavalierly referred to as “the crap.” These items were received with eye rolls and grimaces thankfully hidden behind our Casper the Ghost masks from Woolworth before we moved on, defeated, to the next house.

The worst of these were the hand-made cookies usually given out by someone so excited that you even knocked on their door. Their little Pekinese dog would be at their heels yapping as they placed the cookie directly in your hand, never in the bag. They meant well, and even at that young age we knew they were doing the best they could, that they’d actually put more thought and effort into it than the Graysons three houses down, who had merely bought a bag of Tootsie Rolls to hand out and called it a day. Still, the cookies with pieces of questionable fruit and the occasional flecks of pocket lint were both the worst and the most heartfelt.

Excluding these baked goods, here's a list of what we all considered the worst commercially produced things one could receive while trick-or-treating.

Hard Butterscotch Candies

These were the flat round pieces of candy wrapped in a translucent yellow plastic wrapper. The rest of the year, they lived at the bottom of your grandmother’s purse to be doled out when someone started coughing at church. They were an extremely poor “treat,” and we usually gave them to our younger siblings.

Any and All Wax Things

In what world would wax lips be considered a treat? You can’t even eat them. You have to chew and spit them out. Wax pop bottles were almost as bad, but at least they had a little ersatz “pop” in them. The absolute worst, however, was the wax harmonica. Why? How is this Halloween? Are we supposed to play "Ride of the Valkyries" before chewing the instrument, deriving absolutely no flavor, then find a convenient place to spit it all out?

Mary Janes

Bit O’ Honey’s inferior cousin (and that’s not saying much), these things were an awful combination of molasses and peanut butter and were hard as a rock. Next.

A Nickel

Even back then, five cents would get you nothing, save maybe a piece of Bazooka Joe gum from the back of Miller’s Drug Store, but that’s a lot of work for a 10-year-old. But wait, it could get even worse:

A Penny

You'd receive a nickel from one house, then the next house would say, “Hold my juice box” and give you a single penny. Nobody needs that.

Raisinettes

They try to trick you with chocolate, only to find out it’s just covering up grapes that have gone bad. No, thank you. If you prefer these to Goobers you’re a monster.

Dots

This was one of the many candies that appeared to exist only at Halloween. A great item if you loved chewing on stuff that stuck to your teeth for several days. At least they came only in “fun size” boxes.

Bubblegum

The problem with bubblegum, such as Dubble Bubble, was that you couldn’t partake in this treat during your trek. A single piece of gum would take up time and valuable real estate in your mouth that could be better used enjoying a full-size Twix or something.

An Apple

This lay somewhere between the homemade baked goods and fun-sized chocolate bars. These people probably meant well, but come on. An apple takes up space in the treat bag, offering a weight-to-reward ratio that is way out of whack. They were usually bruised, too, and depending on the level of fear prevalent during that year’s Halloween were promptly thrown out by parents who didn’t want to take a chance. Razor blades, you know.

Candy Necklaces

Just how will that necklace accessorize with the werewolf costume we’re wearing? That string looks like a choking hazard as well. As in the wax harmonica example above, candy does not need to multitask and should pick a lane.

And last, but not least (or maybe it is the least?):

Those Dumb Black and Orange Wrapped Candies

What are these even called? Internet research carried out for this important piece of reportage has come up empty, though the most common answer seems to be “peanut butter kisses.” Whatever they are, they were, without a doubt, the worst. Flavorless candies that were difficult to open and hard to eat, either hard enough to risk tooth enamel damage or so soft that the wrapper stuck to the candy in some sort of alchemic melding and commingling. It was as if the manufacturer thought that simply being in seasonally colored wrappers made it OK. They were wrong. They might as well have wrapped up raw Brussels sprouts in orange and black and called it a day.

Of course, each year we'd eat it all, even the bad stuff. Even the apple, truth be told, if our parents weren’t being paranoid that year. We even looked forward to the cookie ladies and would probably have been disappointed if one year they gave out a full-size Reese’s peanut butter cup instead.
We recently learned that in Canada, they hand out tiny little bags of potato chips, like a half-ounce bag of savory wonderfulness in different flavors, such as ketchup. This is something we can get behind. It could have been the unicorn back in the day, the holy grail. Instead, we occasionally got grandma’s hard pocket butterscotch and crushed dreams.