Welcome to holiday season! Our culture here in Miami is diverse. We celebrate the holidays of many nations, but one of the most ubiquitous of our ‘home grown’ holidays is ‘National Cuban Coffee Day’ It’s celebrated every day in the afternoon on sidewalks all over South Florida. And there are other holidays we’ve grown to love. We have National ‘get rid of the stuff we brought with us from up north that our children won’t take week’ and to help them out we observe ‘National accumulate stuff from other people day’.
We love our holidays and to celebrate, some of the brain dead will actually take out their guns, shoot them in the air and let their neighbors discover the bullet holes next spring during national pressure clean the roof week.
The Celts held a major celebration near the end of the month of October to recognize the end of summer. We recognize the end of summer by opening our windows for three days in January to let the cool breeze in. The Celtic holiday morphed into Halloween when people dress up in costumes and go door to door begging for treats. The question some people’s mind this Halloween is “Do I use all that frou frou, spider webbing and assorted used costume parts to decorate the entire house or produce that award winning ‘Lady Gaga’ costume?
Question: What do: National Chocolate Day, National Candy Corn Day and National Caramel Apple Day have in common? That’s right, they all occur during national ‘See your dentist week!’
It’s almost Halloween and you know what that means. Candy! The top branded retailer of candy corn, Brach’s, sells enough candy corn each year that if the kernels were laid end to end it could circle the earth 4.25 times. If we would do that, it would also provide work for a lot of people and drive down un-employment.
According to the National Confectioners Assn. more than 35 million pounds of candy corn will be produced this year. That’s nearly 9 billion pieces, or one for every person on the planet and the remaining 2 billion for visitors from outer space. They’ll be knocking on your door. If that doesn’t yank your fillings, October is also National Caramel Month.
The candy taunts us with caloric excess and yes, carnauba wax.
It’s used as a surface finishing agent in baked foods, mixes, chewing gum, and auto, floor and shoe polishes. That’s what gives the shine to candy corn, gummy bears and big red wax lips.
We used to buy wax lips to fool people into thinking we had big red lips. We may have started a trend. Big lips are in fashion but they don’t come in a box at the candy counter, they’re much more expensive and they call it a silicone treatment and it’s just the right accent for that old Mick Jagger costume in the closet.
