My Favourite Candy As a Child

A favourite candy when you were a child. Is it still a favourite?

Every year at Halloween as a child I would come home and dump out my trick-or-treat bag and sort it into piles.  The caramels went into the yuck my parents can eat that pile, as did some of the chocolate bars and the cheesies and then I'd find one or two boxes of candy sticks (I'm fairly certain they were called candy cigarettes at the time) and the few bags of Twizzlers Nibs.

I loved Nibs.  They were my absolute favourite candy.  I looked forward to getting them every year and there never seemed to be enough of them in the bag.

By the time I left home for college I wasn't into eating as much candy as my parents rarely had it in the house.

However, that changed when I got a summer job after my first year of college.  I was determined not to go home after first year so I needed to find something.  I applied at a lot of places and had all but given up on a summer job when I came across a small movie theatre in the local mall.

I wasn't sure how to apply so I found myself wandering in aimlessly looking for someone.  I came across a brunette who told me I needed to talk to a man named Sharoam in the office.

Sharoam was a unique man.  He asked me a couple of questions and told me to come in the next day for an interview.  It has to be among the strangest interviews I've ever had but I got the job.  I was told to come in in a couple of days and to wear a white dress shirt, black pants and a black bow tie.  As uniforms go I loved it though I may have looked ridiculous I'm not sure.  I still don't understand how on my break random strangers would ask me where things were in Canadian Tire.. .I thought I was a little overdressed to work there.

At any rate, with the job came some perks.  I got to see all the free movies I wanted, as long as I wasn't working at the time.  I also got all the free popcorn I wanted while on shift and if candy bags broke open we got to eat them!  Unfortunately Nibs rarely broke open.

However, spending so much time in a movie theatre meant I started to buy things at concession before movies.  So started the tradition.   I would buy a package of Nibs and this strange echinacea enhanced fruit drink we sold.  I don't know, it tasted good.

After a few months of working there I ended up leaving but the tradition continued no matter what theatre I went to, except most theatres didn't have the strange echinacea drink so I chose Sprite instead.

In 2008 this all changed of course when I was diagnosed with Celiac disease.  I quickly learned that Nibs unfortunately contained flour which contained wheat which meant they were no longer safe for me to eat.

These days when I go to the movie theatre I just order a Sprite or a bottle of water and look at the Nibs behind the counter and wish I could eat them.

The writing prompt for this post came from: