Some people, when they remember childhood Christmases, think first of a special present: the year of the red bike. Others can't forget certain trees that glittered more than they ever could today. Others have sweet memories of midnight church services when candles lighted worshipers' faces with a glow of love, or of carolers in the snow.
For me, the holidays were a little different. I knew it was really Christmas only after my three brothers and I battled nearly to unconsciousness over the last of the Fannie May Mint Meltaways on my grandmother's candy tray. Any of us would have killed for a green one.
Here, from the company's official literature, is a description of the little chocolates that bedeviled us: "Made exclusively in Chicago, legendary Mint Meltaways have a smooth mint chocolate center, with a coating of milk chocolate or creamy pastel."
Oh, how I want to be a kid again. Last night I dreamed that I was: My youngest brother, Dan, sat under the tree, amid a huge pile of ripped wrapping paper. My other brothers, Jack and Joe, were already mildly bloodied by the puck from the new table-hockey game. Life was good.
Then I woke up. I no longer live in a town where the corner candy store has a red-and-white-striped awning or peddles delicacies with arcane names like Debutantes and Carmarshes that little kids take on faith. "I got the Colonial Assortment for Mom's birthday," we would say proudly, and we would no more question the meaning of the name "Colonial Assortment" in the world of chocolate than a car buyer would ask, "Why Buick Electra?" We knew the Colonial Assortment had the Pixies and the Trinidads.
The dream was gone but the craving for chocolate remained. Chocolate is having the same effect on many people these days.
A University of Michigan survey released last week showed that customer satisfaction with chocolate rose during the third quarter of this year, even as consumers became less satisfied with items like pet food and soft drinks. The reason? "When times are turbulent, chocolate is a very inexpensive comfort," said professor Claes Fornell of the University of Michigan Business School, who oversees the quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Fornell found a similar trend during a recession in northern Europe about a decade ago. "Results then showed that satisfaction with candy was up, also alcohol and hard liquor went up," he said.
Well, I guess they used yeast for baking bread or brewing beer, both of which I consider comfort foods. Still, I couldn't imagine my brothers and me wrestling on the living room floor if the stakes were no higher than the last packet of Fleischmann's RapidRise Yeast.
Fortunately, Fannie May Candies has a Web site (www.fanniemay.com), with a full selection of chocolate products. I also found plenty of other online stores, Groovycandy.com and Sweetnostalgia.com, Gumdroptree.com and Oldtimecandy.com, that have lots of nostalgia-provoking candies, including forgotten favorites from my childhood.
Let's take a moment to consider rock candy. My brothers and I used to ride our bikes up to Keeler's candy store to get a quarter-pound bag of that stuff, glittery as diamonds and just as hard on your teeth. But little did I imagine, in my wildest fantasies, that rock candy comes in seven colors or that you could order it by the kilogram for about US$5.00 from Economycandy.com, an old-fashioned, family-owned store on Manhattan's Lower East Side that also sells hundreds of kinds of candies, nuts and even chocolate-covered graham crackers.
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