Today is National Hard Candy Day, I’m sure intentionally timed for the holidays.  When I was a boy my parents always filled our stockings with hard candy, nuts in shells and a few tangerines, which were special in the winter those days.  We also walked two miles, uphill both ways in the snow every day for school, but that’s another story.  However our stocking stuffers were real, so I have a soft spot (and fewer teeth than normal) for hard candy.  Children today only know from pictures of candy that they crush on screens.  They only consume sour worms, which never occurred to us when we were children.  By golly we only had real worms to get us through the day.  Okay, that’s not true. We also had Pixie Stix (remember those?).

The musical “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” featured a song “Hard Candy Christmas” which signaled tough times ahead.  It was expanded and made popular by Dolly Parton for the movie and it has a poignant ring to it.  I never minded hard candy at Christmas.  It has very nice memories for me.

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