A Jew's Post-Game Guide to Easter Candies
In DepthEaster is upon us, and — wait, Easter is past us? Well, shit. I can’t keep track of your holidays; it’s not like Christianity’s unrelenting omnipresence in American society makes it impossible not to know when anything of significance is happening with you guys. Meanwhile, people still ask me what the deal is with “that thing with the lights at Christmastime.”
Screw it, Easter was only two days ago. I must’ve missed it since it’s taken me weeks to wrap my head around all the weird, pastel-colored crap the goyim ingest this time of year. We’ll press on.
Anyway, as a Jew, I had never really seen or experienced the madness that is Easter Candy until the last few days. What I learned in researching (I use that term loosely) this is that when it comes to holiday confections, you guys go to levels of weird that would make Prince give you side-eye. To be fair, all religions are weird, and most weird religious traditions boil down to “because religion.” But while weird Jewish food typically manifests as Soylent Gray, Christianity’s culinary madness is WAY more interesting and inventive. A lot of conspiracy theorists think we dominate the entertainment and creative industries, but man, if your weird foods are any indication, we are not REMOTELY as creatively insane as you guys.
Jordan Almonds — OK, I know I’ve said before that almonds make every dessert better, but that doesn’t work if you coat them in brightly colored gerbil turds. Is that even a colored candy shell? Are we sure that isn’t pastel paint? It really looks like you’re eating almond paint chips. You have fun with that, guys.
Chocolate Rabbits — I mean, what the hell am I supposed to say? It’s a wad of chocolate carved into the shape of a bunny. It’s neither gross nor particularly interesting or unusual in any way.
Wait, these things are hollow? Fuck that, then. What the hell is the point of a chocolate rabbit if you’re not even going to make it a solid block of chocolate? I get it if you were filling them with something (which I guess some people do), but if you’ve just hollowed-out a rabbit shell, that just seems like the world’s laziest con.
Cadbury Creme Eggs — Oh my God, you people won’t shut the fuck up about these things. You get the same reaction when tell someone you’ve never eaten a Cadbury Creme Egg as when you tell them you have no interest in ever watching The Wire (also me) or that you never learned to ride a bicycle (yup, me again) — incomprehension mixed with pity and despair. At this point, I’m refusing to eat them purely as a “fuck you” to everyone telling me I need to eat them, because, sure, that’s a healthy psychological response and isn’t in any way indicative of Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
Anyway, this is apparently a chocolate shell filled with the facsimile of an unfertilized chicken fetus. Who the hell looked at an egg and thought, “Man, I could TOTALLY make a candy out of that”? How are you even supposed to eat these things? If you take a bite, the fake sugary egg yolk (Christ, I just dry-heaved even TYPING that sentence) would go everywhere, wouldn’t it? How do these not have structural integrity issues? Also, isn’t this thing basically a candy grenade? I feel like I’d have more fun lobbing them at people than actually eating them.
These things beg SO many questions.
Sugar Egg Dioramas — …BUT NOT AS MANY QUESTIONS AS THESE FUCKING THINGS. HOLY SHIT, WHAT THE BALLSACK ARE THESE?!
OK. It’s OK. Calm down, C.A. Deep breaths.
These were BY FAR the weirdest thing I discovered when I delved into Easter Candies. I can’t understand how the amount of drugs necessary to come up with the idea didn’t immediately kill the person who thought of it. It’s hard to explain why, but there’s something about these that doesn’t just border on creepy, it dives right into creepy so deep it’s going to get Decompression Sickness if it’s not careful about how quickly it surfaces. It’s like a celebrity stalker who knits the celebrity a pair of socks out of their own leg hair, only if that celebrity was Jesus. Or the Easter Bunny, it’s not entirely clear. These give me the heebie jeebies, and I am a man given to neither heebies nor jeebies. Let’s just move on.
Jelly Beans — I didn’t even think of these as Easter Candy until I started looking into this; I just thought of them as a cruel joke played on children the world over. I don’t care if you somehow come up with a way to flavor something with rainbows and unicorn giggles, if you give it the texture of a jelly bean, it’s still going to be horrifying. There’s just no saving these goddamn things.
Also, lately you guys have been getting really meta with your weird jelly bean flavors. Jelly beans are the hipsters of the candy community. I’d say “hipsters ruin everything” like I always do, but come on; jelly beans permanently exist in a state of ruination. Also, there’s the fact that the Jelly Belly guy is a transphobic shithead. So there’s that.
Necco Wafers — These look like discs of compressed, colorized talcum powder. Who’s the practical joker who decided to market Pepto Bismol tablets as a delightful candy snack? Come on, asshole, April Fools was three weeks ago. You’re not fooling anyone.
Candy Quax — From commenter JustASmore: “These are hollow milk flavored, which is like the taste of regular milk, but it makes you empty inside.” If Ernie ever joined Al-Qaeda and got taken prisoner, I feel like this is the candy they would serve at Gitmo when they wanted to break his spirit. The less said about these, the better.
Marshmallow Peeps — Who thought these were a good idea? I can’t believe a candy executive heard a pitch for “it’s like marshmallow covered with the congealed, rusted blood of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and went “Johnson, YOU’RE A GODDAMNED GENIUS!” These feel like the result of a bet about what Americans will or will not eat that just went WAY too far.
I actually did try them once before; I just never associated them with Easter before this article. They taste like radioactive insulation foam. Since that fateful day, I have desperately struggled to figure out why someone would ever consume one willingly. I’m pretty sure Peeps featured heavily in one of the scenes from the Saw movies. These aren’t candy — they’re packing peanuts with better PR.
Although I am glad for peeps for making this scene possible:
Happy Easter, everybody.
Lead image via Julie Clopper/Shutterstock.
Image (Jordan Almonds) via Hank Shiffman/Shutterstock.
Image (Chocolate Rabbit) via oksana2010/Shutterstock.
Image (Jelly Beans) via Jiri Hera/Shutterstock.