SYMHC Classics: The History of Halloween Candy
Stuff You Missed in History Class- 1,579 views
- 31 Oct 2020
Happy Halloween! To celebrate, we're revisiting a 2014 episode. Candy and Halloween go hand-in-hand, but when did candy become the standard for trick-or-treating, and who invented the holiday's most famous sweet treats like candy corn?
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Happy Saturday, everybody, and happy Halloween. We know a lot of folks are missing out on trick or treating this year because of the pandemic. The CDC has listed traditional trick or treating as a higher risk activity. And a lot of communities have canceled or modified their usual Halloween celebrations.
So we thought we would close out October this year with our previous episode on the history of Halloween candy, since if you can't trick or treat, you can, we hope at least have the treat part, whether it is candy or some other thing that you love so much candy corn. This episode does conclude with a discussion of poison candy tragedies. So if you are not up for that today, that discussion picks up after the second outbreak and you just skip it.
Yeah, and this originally came out on October 29, 2014.
Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the broadcast. I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Wilson. So I know as we've been leading into Halloween, we've been doing some thematic things. And I know the episode on the Volesky Axe murders was pretty grim. So I apologize. That was a little too dark for anybody. So I thought to close out our Halloween episode, it would be fun to sweeten things up a bit.
And instead of talking about another grisly thing this year, we kind of edge up on the day itself. We could talk about the history of Halloween candy. There was an episode a couple of years back that Sarah was on and Kristen Konger guest hosted from Stuff Mom never told you. And they talked a little bit about Candy in their history of trick or treating, but they focused more on sort of a lot of the other cultural aspects of trick or treating.
So we're going to dig a little deeper and skip talking about the costumes and the other trappings of Halloween night and just focus on the sweet sugary stuff.
Also, in the interest of expectations management, we are pretty much talking about modern trick or treating and how it has existed in the 20th century. We're not really going to talk too much, although we'll touch on it briefly about the older historical rituals associated with the holiday or the time of year that are sometimes discussed as sort of the precursors of the trick or treating tradition. So we will cover a little bit about how Candy kind of became the star of the show.
And then we'll talk about the history of a candy considered to be a Halloween classic, even though it is apparently not all that popular. And because I can't resist a little bit of ghoulishness, we'll also talk briefly about the various scares that have happened in the media and in sort of the urban legend arena about purposely tainted or booby trapped candy.
So to start it off, though, we're going to actually talk about a different day than Halloween.
Mere Halloween. That was also about candy.
Yeah. Before Halloween became the candy holiday. I mean, there's lots of candy associated with lots of other holidays. But, Candy, Halloween is the big name. So Confectioner's tried to launch a candy specific holiday and they called it in a huge amount of creativity. Candy day.
Yeah, Candy, it was first launched in 1916 and it would fall on the second Saturday of October. And it was pitched to the public as a way to sort of encourage a spirit of giving in friendship. A lot of the ad campaigns around it were about take a break and make sure someone, you know, is getting candy today. And they also were trying to allegedly recognize the food value of candy in the early 1920s. It was even marketed with a campaign to give candy away to the elderly and orphan.
So people who were candy needy, but really it was a manufactured holiday to boost profits for candy companies.
Candy Day was even renamed to Sweetest Day to encourage association with kindness and generosity. And it continued to be celebrated on the second Saturday of October, right into the 50s and beyond. I remember calendars when I was a kid having sweets day on them and be very confused about what that was. Yeah, some U.S. cities still celebrate it, though. And if you ask most people what they were planning for it, you would probably be met with a blank stare, which I think is what happened when I said what is sweetest day.
It says it here on the calendar. Yeah, I'm trying to remember which I know Detroit allegedly still celebrates it and I'm trying to remember a couple of the other cities that I saw. So if you're from any of those, write us and let us know if they actually are celebrated or if it's kind of just a holiday that's on the books.
But no one really does anything for the idea, though, of going door to door for treats on Halloween is believed to have started somewhere in the early part of the twentieth century. So that is different from sweetest day, although the exact starting point of when trick or treating really took off is a little bit fuzzy.
But we're talking about somewhere between 1919 teens as the window of when people think it was first started.
The how and the why are kind of blurry. Also, there's some speculation that is Halloween became a night for pranks and vandalism early in the 20th century. More organized trick or treating outings were sort of arranged by communities as a way to distract people from egging houses and whatnot. This isn't certain, though. And sugar rationing after World War Two broke out may have gummed up that plan anyway.
And despite the haze of trick or treating origins, we do know that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was pretty established culturally as a tradition. You know, most people will say it kind of ebbed and flowed in terms of popularity, but there is evidence of its popularity at this point from the world really of entertainment. So Jack Benny actually made jokes about the practice in his radio show as early as 1948. And Trick or treating appeared in Peanuts comics as early as 1951.
In 1952, there was a Disney cartoon about Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie going trick or treating. So we know at that point, trick or treating was firmly established. So in terms of there being an actual recognized practice of trick or treating, it's actually really recent. We're looking back at, you know, 70 years ago.
And why is Candy part of the deal? This is actually an interesting sort of sociological anthropological approach to it, according to Candy historian Beth Kimberle sugar and this desire for sugar is an almost instinctive part of preparation for winter. So even going back to Celtic festivals of fall, I know we said we were going to talk about those much, but this is just a brief one. You know, part of the activity was that they were using sugar and then sometimes honey to preserve foods to get through winter.
So to some degree, there could be a little bit of sort of ancient instinct factoring into your craving for caramel in autumn. You're also adding a little padding to your person to get through the cold period when fresh food might not be readily available, or at least you would be if we needed it. And if we were in an age, you know, in the modern era where everything could be preserved and shipped worldwide, we're fortunate enough in most places that would probably be hearing this to have access to fresh food pretty much year round.
And this is kind of an aside. But last week I went to a thing called Barf Fest, which is the festival of bad ad hoc hypotheses. And basically people make up. These are really off the wall hypotheses that are weirdly supported by data that are made to be ridiculous. And this whole candy hypothesis in the wintertime might have had a good place at that festival.
Yeah, it's it's one of those that's interesting to think about. And I can see the logic of it. I don't know if I buy it, do it 100 percent, but it's fun to talk about.
It is. And Fest is fun. And they say, we hope you learn nothing because everything is false. So anyway, once candy companies realize that trick or treating was a for real tradition, it wasn't long before they started coming up with ways to capitalize on it by making sweet treats that had a specifically holiday focus.
And initial efforts on the parts of most of these confectioner's were really focused around not marketing directly to consumers with like special holiday wraps and Halloween themed candy like we'd see today, but more to shopkeepers. So they were pretty much selling the same normal candy, but they were parceling them, you know, in their palates and their big shipping cases as autumn and Halloween specific in an effort to get those shopkeepers to promote candy as Halloween drew near.
And this is actually important since at the time, Candy wasn't the only giveaway that you might reasonably expect as a Halloween handout. Both Kool-Aid and Kellogg's were marketing their products as perfect items to hand out to trick or treaters in the 1950s. And Candy also competed with nuts, fruit, small toys and homemade treats. Yeah, if you know Kellogg's had one, we might all be getting cereal on Halloween, which is not a bad thing, but it would be a very different holiday.
Brocks, which is the company that's still around and churning out caramels and candy corn, among other sweets, was one of the first companies to market special Halloween candy directly to the consumer. In 1962, they started putting images of jack lanterns on their candy boxes. And this was actually way ahead of most other candy companies.
As we got into the 1970s, candy makers really started to step up their game. And this is when Marshmallow Peeps first started to appear in special Halloween editions like cats and Pumpkins. Those were originally market is as which mellows.
And I will just say to this day, the peeps chocolate mousse kitties are one of my very favorite Halloween treats. I love them.
Candy and individual small wrappers started to be standard. Companies were starting to make value add candies as well so that you could give those out to ghosts and ghouls who might arrive on your doorstep demanding sugar. So this is when candy packs came with wrappers that would like turn into puppets and boxes, would have little punch out windows so that they could kind of become little temporary haunted House playset kind of activities. I loved all that stuff when I was a kid to give me a candy plus an activity to do once I was full of sugar and I was the happiest child around.
This is also the time in the 70s when one of my very favorites, known as Mr. Bones debuted at Mr Bones was the candy skeleton that came in a little black coffin. So it was basically like bones and a skull and little pieces.
And I would always spend way too much time putting him together. Like I would make sure that all my bones were laid out as properly as could be, given the candy molds that they used to create them. And then I would eat him from the feet up. And I remember I would always get really dismayed if I had not gotten enough of the proper parts to make the full skeleton. But I loved Mr. Bones.
But before we get to another rather ghoulish candy trend, do you want to have a quick word from a sponsor? I sure do.
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Listen to the brand new season of Beyond the Beauty on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, join me as we all learn about the real meaning of beauty. So gross out Candy first appeared in the 1980s, there was just the whole trend of disgusting things, I never liked it, but boy, it sure was popular.
Yeah, thanks to garbage, candy and garbage pail kids, this completely gross out candy was now on the scene, and that's when edible eyeballs and chocolate covered brains first hit the market. And there's just really been no end to the grossness since then. This turned into a trend and it quickly grew in popularity. So a lot of companies started offering this gross candy year round instead of just that Halloween.
And the year round trend is something that sort of ironically is affecting the way in which Candy is now being offered. So Halloween candy got so popular that people started offering it year round.
But now many candy companies are trying to find new ways to take the focus off of exclusive Halloween pushes. So a lot of them are offering treats that are more sort of autumn focused instead of just doing Halloween specific packaging.
So that way, while the Halloween that's very clearly marked, Halloween candy gets marked down like half off or more on November 1st, all of those yummy treats that have more general autumn colored wrappers and flavors can still be offered at regular price.
So if you think about your local retail store, you probably can quickly envision Reese's Cups and Hershey's Kisses and other chocolates and candies that are now sort of wrapped in like gold russet and copper foil wrappers. And that's part of why that transition happen. Instead of marketing for one day, they're marketing for a season.
Well, this is also reminding me of the rebranding of other holidays, candies as Halloween candy, like the advent of Cadbury scream eggs, which I might need to go find some as soon as we're done recording.
Yeah, that's I have an unhealthy relationship with the Cadbury Cream and Cadbury Cadbury's Cream ex.
So with all of this, they're hoping that candy consumption will go right on through Thanksgiving before you transition into the winter holiday Candy. And this makes business sense.
Instead of marketing this one day holiday like Halloween, they can market to this whole season of candy consumption.
Yeah, because Candy, for Halloween comes out so early now, I mean, that's almost a full half year of just solid candy marketing by the time you factor in fall and the winter holidays. So in 2011, it was estimated that Halloween candy sales made up for two point three billion dollars of the six billion dollars associated with American spending around the Halloween holiday. So while costumes and decor are gobbling up an ever bigger chunk of the Halloween spending numbers, Candy still holds a strong position.
They pull in more than a third of the consumer dollars that are spent on this holiday.
According to the California Milk Processors Board, the average candy toting Halloween jack lantern holds 250 pieces of candy, and that's about 9000 calories and three pounds of sugar, which if you are a longtime listener of the podcast, you know my mother would disapprove of.
Yeah, we kind of had a free for all at our house. That's one of those statistics that I read. And it was startling because I know how many times I devoured a solid half of my bucket or I mean, not all kids only stick to the jack o' lantern. We had pillowcases some years, like I remember the trick or treating with pillowcases that I definitely took in more than three pounds of sugar at a time sometimes.
But now we're going to shift. Now, we've kind of talked about how Candy and Halloween got married. We are going to talk about candy corn. And for full disclosure, I love candy corn so much. This is my one of my very favorites. I know that's not the case for everyone, but I love it all.
Caps love. So at the same time, a lot of people really hate it. I am not one of those people, but a lot of people hate it and that is the word they use. But somehow candy corn remains a standard part of the Halloween candy repertoire. There are 35 million pounds of candy corn made every year, which is nine billion pieces.
Yeah, I read one statistic, I believe it was at the National Confectioners Association.
And it they had done a survey and it was basically like most people hate more people dislike candy corn than like it. But those same people say that it's still like a required part of the holiday, like it's such a an iconic element of Halloween candy that they're like, well, you can't have Halloween without candy corn. Oh, I hate it.
But it's like the people who eat the cranberry sauce for MacKean and they don't really know why they do it at Thanksgiving, but they do because they feel like they have to you. Yeah, it's a pity they should try some homemade cranberry sauce.
I know that's what I did.
And as an aside, in another survey that was conducted by the National Confectioners Association in 2013, they surveyed one thousand three hundred thirty five adults about the proper way to consume candy corn.
Forty six point eight percent felt that you should just pop the whole piece in your mouth at once.
However, very close behind forty two point seven think that you should start with the narrow end, which is usually white.
But when you get into especially specialty flavors as different and ten point six percent think starting with the white end is the way to go. But I also have to wonder, given what we were just saying about how many people dislike it, how many of those respondents said you should throw it out before actually giving their eating preference?
Regardless of how you feel about it and the reason that we're talking about it today, it's been around for a long time.
Yeah, the invention of this ubiquitous candy is normally credited to a candy maker named George Renninger. And he was working at the Wonderly Candy Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 80s when he is said to have first made it. And there were other confectioner's that were making candies with very similar texture and that sort of just general sugar flavor that were molded into foliage like, you know, leaves and other nature shapes, acorns, et cetera. But Renninger was the first to create this multicolored stripe design.
It was the striping that really drew people's attention, and it also made candy corn a real challenge to make. Kettles of boiling sugar slurry were mixed with marshmallow and fondant, and this resulting concoction was poured into buckets. Stringers were men tasked with walking and pouring out these 45 pound buckets into the candy molds. Because of the striping, they had to make three passes to make every batch of candy corn.
And as I was researching this and how they did it, my first thought was like they never mentioned it. But that seems like a really dangerous job to me. If any of our listeners have ever made Candy and come in contact with boiling sugar, it's terrible.
That's like an instant horrifying burn on your skin. And it sticks because it's sugar. So it's really hard to get off and the burn gets deeper and worse, like while you're trying to clean it. And they didn't talk about that. But I feel like carrying 45 pound buckets of this hot sugar mixture seemed had to be like a high risk of injury or at the very least scalding. Not the scalding isn't an injury, but you know what I mean.
Like, it just seems rough.
Bad burns extremely bad. Seems like a really dangerous job to me. The process has really not changed that much today, except that now it is mechanized. So there is not risk to human skin and it's not as time consuming or backbreaking. But other than that, it's pretty close to the original process. Even though it's now really closely linked with Halloween, this wasn't always the case. In the 1950s, there were ad campaigns promoting candy corn, which had also gone by the name Chickenfeed and early incarnations as a summertime treat or something for a year round.
As with other sweet makers, the companies that made candy corn really started to focus their energies on Halloween marketing in the 1950s.
So the fall in Halloween colors of the candy, which it had originally, made it a very natural fit for the holiday. So it sort of made a home there, as it were. But in recent years, candy corn has been made over as well, just as we talked about other candies taking on sort of a more seasonal approach so that it could, you know, kind of spread across the calendar.
So Brocks and Jelly Belly, which are the two main candy corn manufacturers today, are trying to keep it relevant year round. You can get spring colored bunny corn for Easter baskets. They make pink and red cupid corn for Valentine's Day. There is red and green reindeer corn at Christmas time, I think one year. And I'm not sure if this is a consistent thing that they still offer. But I remember seeing a Fourth of July red, white and blue candy corn one year.
I don't remember what manufacturer made it, but there are also innumerable specialty flavors of candy corn available today in addition to the classic sort of general sugar flavor.
And if you do like candy corn, like I do Broks Caramel Macchiato flavor this year is my absolute favorite.
I have eaten an absolutely unconscionable amount in the last week. You can celebrate National Candy Corn Day on October 30th. So we're right there. It go run out and buy a bag if you want. And if you're not in the U.S., you can still celebrate, even though that's one of our national holidays.
But now that we have had my candy corn fangirl situation, we are going to talk about some of the scarier aspects of Halloween candy. But before that, do you want to take a word from a sponsor? I do.
There's a huge irony to Halloween candy collecting tradition, unlike the rest of the year when kids are not supposed to take candy from strangers on October 31st, unless your mother is like my mother and you only trick or treat it at the homes of people you knew personally and extensively encouraged to do exactly that.
Yeah, the risk inherent in doing so has, of course, given rise to all manner of stories and myths and third and fourth hand accounts of horrible things that people will allege really happened to their cousin's sister's best friends. And it's completely natural to be fearful of the unknown. There are certainly enough real life horrors that are reported on the news all the time to feed the fear of a wicked, cruel person poisoning candy to pass out to kids on Halloween.
Well, even with so many communities having, like a safe trick or treating event, I was always like that just seems like you could hurt more kids at once. Um, yeah.
I don't know if we're paranoid. I have very similar thoughts. I'm yeah. I'm glad I'm not a parent because I would be the mom that never let my kid do any of this stuff right. However, most of the stories of tainted candy don't really stand up to closer inspection. There are definitely a few which have made headlines over the years. And Snopes, which I love, Snopes Dotcom is it? If you're wondering if something is true or not, they have a long list of these events.
We'll cover just a few of them.
So in a case where there was actual poison involved, but it seems like not so much evil intent. Stick with me. A woman in Greenlawn, New York, made a really terrible decision when she decided to teach teens a lesson about being too old to trick or treat in 1964. So Helen File prepared these special packages of non treats to hand out to her, to hand out to teenagers when they came to her door for trick or treating. And these packages had steel wool pads, dog biscuits and arsenic laced candy buttons.
And File told the older kids that she handed them out to you, that they were a joke and that they were in fact, poisonous. They had skull and crossbones on them and poison written on them, and no one ingested any of them. But she was handing out poison to kids. So she was charged with child endangerment. She pled guilty and she received a suspended sentence. That just seems like maybe she went a little too far trying to make her point.
Yeah, it seems like the arsenic laced candy buttons was was one step over the line, maybe more than one step. It was over the line in Detroit in 1970. Kevin Tostan, who was five, died after spending four days in a coma following a heroin overdose. And the drug was found in his Halloween candy. So while his death was accidental, the family actually staged a cover up of what had really happened. Kevin had gotten into his uncle's stash and the family had then sprinkled heroin into his trick or treat candy in hoping that a mystery villain would be blamed for it.
Yeah, and it was one of those things that even once the the truth sort of came out that he had actually gotten into separate from his Halloween candy, his uncle's drugs.
By that point, like the newspaper headlines had already spread everywhere. You know, that this five year old had died from poison Halloween candy or from drug laced Halloween candy. And so that was really the thing that people remembered.
And even though there was an explanation that sort of the fear was already pretty placed at that point.
And then in 1974 and what was it really just a horrible and tragic event.
There was what initially appeared to be a legitimate poison candy incident. There was an eight year old in Deer Park, Texas, named Timothy O'Brien, and he died after eating tainted pixie sticks candy after he went trick or treating on Halloween night. And the truly horrific turn of events is that the boy had been poisoned, but not by a stranger handing out bad candy. It was, in fact, the child's father, Ronald Clark O'Brien, who was found guilty in the murder investigation around the poisoning.
Yeah, it turned out that the boy's father had handed out Pixy Stix laced with cyanide to his son and daughter and to a friend's children. And his actual target was his son because he had taken out a 40000 dollar life insurance policy on him. His distribution of the candy to other kids was to support this story that somebody at one of the houses where they'd stopped trick or treating had given out the bad candy instead of him.
He was found guilty in the investigation and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection almost ten years after the murder of his son in 1984. And this is one that is bad enough on its own. But when people retell the story, they often embellish it and they'll say exactly ten years later on Halloween.
But now he was executed at a different time of year.
But I kind of feel like that one is bad enough on its own. You don't need to add, you know, poignant timing details to it.
So while there haven't actually been any documented cases of, like widespread distribution of tainted candy. To stranger children, these myths persist and parents are understandably fearful, and you know that taking candy from people you don't know is an inherently risky thing to do. But if there is an upside to all of the fear surrounding potentially tainted candy, it's actually the benefit that it offers candy companies. So parents have become less suspicious of factory sealed candies and individually wrapped these little smaller packages than they would be of homemade treats, which used to be a lot more common.
I know when I was trick or treating as a kid, we had neighbors that would make like popcorn balls or we had one neighbor that would give out. She would do the little chocolate mold candies of her own. Like that would never fly today unless you were going to like a specific friend's house for a party. You could not go to a stranger's house and get a popcorn ball and probably be allowed to eat it once you got home.
Yeah, I remember my mom going through all of the Halloween candy and throwing away anything that was suspicious to her, which was mostly stuff that was homemade, that was even used after only trick or treating at the homes of people that we knew.
You know, better safe than sorry, I mean, I kind of can't fault her for it. I really can't either. You know, she had their best interests in mind. We have to make sure my kids were safe. She also had some pretty strict rules about how much candy we could like. We are having the Halloween candy at our house usually lasted a really long time because it was sort of rationed and a little bit odd at our house.
It was like a crazy, wild free for all at our house. We were very horrible.
So, yeah, that's sort of Halloween candy through history. A lot of that's more modern history than we usually cover. But it's one of those things that we don't really get to kind of delve into. And it's the perfect time of year to play around with candy and sweets discussions, which I always love.
So even in some cities today, like I know there are a few local police precincts and stuff that will sometimes do like a candy inspection station on Halloween night, or you can go and have your candy x rayed to make sure there's nothing dicey in it of a metal nature or anything. So those are still out there as safeguards, even though, as we said, there haven't been any documented cases. If it makes parents feel better, I think that's great.
And now I just want to go eat three pounds of candy corn, but I'm probably alone in the. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast at I Heart radio dot com. Our old HowStuffWorks email address no longer works and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history.
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