Remembering Wax Candy

Another candy themed post in honor of Halloween, from Bill Bryson's memorable and amusing "Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid". Bill reminisces about the candies he loved as a child in the 1950s.

"Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very much like a small dose of cough syrup. You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours. Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course. But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better. and there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained, about eating a product that had neither flavor or nutritive value."