Snack Chat: Closet Candy

On fear, delight, and hoarding Halloween hauls

In Wintering, Katherine May writes of Halloween as a border crossing into winter, a liminal time, “those moments when we’re standing on the boundary between fear and delight.” She did not mean this in quite the same way, but I’ve also been thinking about what it means to stand on that boundary, especially in the context of candy, something that, as children, we understand to be both dangerous and pleasurable.

When I think of Halloween candy, I think of it first in a pillowcase (the cool receptacle for trick-or-treating between grades 3 and 5, at least in my hometown in the 1990s), lumpy on the floor of my childhood bedroom closet.