… it causes cavities.

How’s your Halloween candy stash holding up? Be honest and raise your hand if you had to go out and buy more goodies for the ghouls and goblins that will be arriving at your house two days from now. I heard on the news that this year Americans would buy 600 million pounds of candy (90 million of it which would be chocolate) and spend nearly $1.90 billion (with a “B”) for that Halloween candy. That’s just amazing to me. I gave up sweets a few years ago for Lent and never regressed be it for baked goods or candy or gum. I have a very-occasional cornbread cake but that’s it and that really is not sweet so I don’t feel I need to have any wiggle room if I “fall off the wagon” to eat cornbread. When I got my temporary crown last week, Dr. Kelly said no Tootsie Rolls or gum and I told him no problem with that because I don’t indulge. I bet those sticky, gooey peanut-butter kisses in the black and orange wrappers would do a number on that temporary crown. I told my dentist I never got hooked on sticky and gooey candy as a kid as I wasn’t allowed to eat it and chocolate was just a occasional treat. The family (that being my parents and me) shared one large Cadbury chocolate bar on a Saturday night while watching TV and that was the extent of my eating chocolate. That was not a weekly treat either. In Canada, we trick-or-treaters would arrive at homeowners’ doors and cry out “Shell out, shell out – the witches are out” and not “treat or treat” as they do here in the States. My parents rifled through my cache of candy, plucking out sticky toffees, hard candy suckers, popcorn balls and all unwrapped treats before I was permitted to indulge. That didn’t leave much else unfortunately – maybe a few single strawberry Twizzlers, or a bag or two of chocolate goodies comparable to Raisinets or Goobers or the perennial favorite, Smarties, the Canadian equivalent of M&Ms. Since I wasn’t a big candy eater anyway, it wasn’t a real hardship for my candy to be misappropriated. Back in the day when I got braces on my teeth, gum was out and I missed it for awhile, but got over it. I can safely say I’ve never had bubblegum in my life – no Bazooka bubblegum or Bazooka Joe ‘toons for this kid. I don’t know whether I should feel deprived, but query … how did I get the two cavities that eventually crumbled and needed crowns? Hmmmmmmmm. I suspect devilish little dental demons were hard at work somewhere along the line.