It’s March. Here’s My Review of Some Christmas Candy I Found At the Goodwill.

Posted on

Mar 3, 2025

Posted in: Food

It is March. I am standing in my kitchen in my PJs, eating Christmas candy that I purchased from the Goodwill.

To be clear, it was not my intention to be eating yuletide-themed confections on the precipice of spring, like Miss Havisham, but for snacks. It’s just that sometimes in life we find ourselves in places we never expected. A police holding cell. Tottering on the brink of totalitarianism. Florida.

When I purchased the candy – before Christmas, I might add, as I proudly hitch up the burlap sack I am wearing as trousers – only some of it was from the Goodwill. I am telling you this because I want you to think I am holding it together. That I am not just randomly opening up bags on the shelves at the thrift store and shoving the contents into my mouth, hoping that it’s edible and not filled with asbestos or Funyons. This is preferable to the truth, which is that every time I read the news, or catch a glimmer of a headline, it feels like baboons screaming inside my head.

My intention, in the decades ago that was December, was to review the candy before Christmas. But the days piled on, and Christmas – the first one without my aunt, around whom the holiday always revolved – shattered my heart. I lugged the candy down with me to California, so determined was I to eat it and write about it, but then the day came and went. I figured I would put up a post a few days after Christmas – wouldn’t that be hilarious?

Anyway, now it’s March.

(Before anyone judges me: I’ve checked the expiration date for all of the candy involved, and it is still months away. So I feel as though even the manufacturers accounted for this behavior, reasoning that at least five percent of people who buy their product are gremlins.)

Some of you are probably wondering: Why now? Don’t I have better things to do? Is attempting to write nuanced and insightful food humor at this juncture the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking Titanic? Is this the literary/culinary equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned?

Those are very important questions, probably.

Gingerbread Marshmallow Peeps. These smell delicious. I am not being sarcastic. I realize why you would think that based on, well, *gestures to my entire career* but they smell delicious, and they taste pretty good. I don’t know what alchemy is involved to create this, because Peeps are not food. Which means they’ll probably soon count as a vegetable for elementary school lunches. School lunches that are not free, for some fucking reason.

If you like cinnamon marshmallows, these are pretty good, even though they look like they’ve been dropped in sand.

Marshmallow Candy Cane Peeps. If you are looking for a mint marshmallow, then this is the Peep for you! A slight product development hitch, as the peppermint speckles on white bird-shaped marshmallows make them look like white peace doves splattered blood. Which I’m sure isn’t a portent of anything.

A bunch of white dove-shaped marshmallows that had red specks all over them.

Christmas-Tree Shaped Peeps. Okay, I’m not gonna lie. At this point, it feels like maybe the product development team at Peeps is just phoning things in, because these are marshmallows that are vaguely tree shaped (they are not, I should note, tree flavored). Which is funny, because the notion of a Christmas tree actually comes from Pagan tradition, and based on most assessments, Jesus would have been born in the Spring. His birthday was likely shifted to the winter to co-opt the Pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice.

Oh, also, he didn’t exist, and if he did, he wasn’t white.

Peppermint Crunch Junior mints. These boast “a sweet outer crunch” like a York-peppermint patty but with a partial exoskeleton. The picture on the front makes it look like they have contracted a case of measles. The Junior Mints themselves also look like they’ve contracted a case of measles. By the way, have you seen that measles are back? Like, for real? And the new United States Secretary of Health and Human Services literally doesn’t think vaccines work even though he got every single fucking Covid vaccine and keeps getting them, like what the actual fuck, if you are going to be a useless science-denying piece of shit who’s responsible for the death of what will likely be millions of people at least have the decency take your own garbage advice.

I forgot what I was saying.

The packaging for box of Junior Mints that shows the candies as having little red freckles on them.

Oh, yeah. Junior mints.

Have you ever dropped a piece of candy in dirt and then you pick it up and eat it while screaming “Five second rule!” even though it’s been more than five seconds and that’s not how germ theory works? And the piece of candy is weirdly crunchy but you can’t complain because you’ve done this to yourself? That’s these.

Gingerbread flavored Red Vines. These serve no purpose, are wholly repellant, and they look vaguely like they’re made of human skin. They’re basically the JD Vance of candy. You might be into these if you’re into chewy gingerbread and your parents didn’t love you. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if T.J. Maxx labeled their entire fall candle section as edible (which I’m sure will happen as soon since the FDA has been replaced with a YouTuber whose legal name is IShitOnURMOMzz) this is it.

Palmer Double Crisp Coal. I want to salute the good people at Palmer candies for saying, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could eat band-aids?” In addition to their gumi-aids (which is the actual name of a very real product that you should not buy) and bubble gum cigarettes (also real, also don’t), they make something called double crisp coal, which, thanks to their diligent legal team, cannot be labeled as chocolate. That’s because the legal definition of chocolate in the United States means that it has to contain cocoa butter (which is just another example of pesky oppressive consumer protection measures dictating that food labels have to mean something.)

The texture is dryer and more saccharine than chocolate, and if you were a kid in the late 70s or early 80s, running feral and blissfully unaware that the failed re-election of Jimmy Carter was going to put us all on a 45-year path to doom, this will hit all the right nostalgic notes. They’re not good, they’re barely edible, really, but they’re a reminder of a simpler time when we had the good sense to know that Russia’s leadership was trying to destroy us.

Jelly Belly Christmas Jewel Mix. I read some insider-leaked history about how Reagan didn’t actually enjoy jelly beans, but an enterprising campaign consultant suggested that he start eating them at the start of his political career, so people wouldn’t catch on to the fact that he was a hateful ghoulish piece of shit. The joke’s on us because apparently being a hateful ghoulish piece of shit is now a precursor to higher office. Anyway, Jelly Belly’s Christmas Jewel mix boasts three different flavors: Jewel Very Cherry, Jewel Green Apple, and Jewel Cream Soda. The bag smells like cough medicine and the beans look like they’ve been painted with nail polish. The Jelly Belly factory supposedly has a mosaic jelly bean portrait of both Ron and Nancy, who both notably didn’t give a shit about the AIDS crisis because it disproportionately killed gay men, including their close friend Rock Hudson.

The best flavor in the Christmas Jewel mix is Green Apple.

Jelly Belly Candy Cane Flavored Jelly Beans. These jelly beans are excessively minty, look vaguely like they’re growing mold spores, and taste slightly like floor cleaner. Speaking of floor cleaner, did you know that Lysol put out a series of ads in the 20th Century subtly recommending that women use their product as a form of birth control? This was because oral contraceptives were illegal (they stayed that way until 1965 for married couples and 1972 for single people) – so they advised women to douche with Lysol. The product (which was much more noxious in its early days than its current iteration) is toxic to human sperm, but it’s also toxic to humans, and a number of people died from Lysol poisoning. And also from, you know, lack of access to oral contraception. This will be useful information to anyone who’s skimmed the 65% of Project 2025 they haven’t yet completed.

Christmas Tree Snickers. These differ slightly from the original log shaped confection. They are flatter, have more surface area, and the caramel and nougat are softer in texture (personally, I found this to all be a downgrade vs. the bar). This is largely owing to a shape that is more arrowhead than Christmas tree. Speaking of arrowheads, did you ever notice that the National Park Service logo is an arrowhead? Apparently it’s meant to symbolize “the natural, wildlife, water, geologic, historic, and cultural resources protected by the National Park Service.” Anyway, apparently Elon Musk, who was elected to *checks notes* fucking nothing at all, has cut 1,000 NPS jobs while the Trump administration is planning on like, logging Yellowstone, selling most of the parks, and ending the only thing other than money that America still has going for it… or something.

Post Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles Cereal Flavored Candy Canes. What I find truly critically important about this product is that according to the package, The Flintstones celebrate Christmas. This means that Jesus predated, or existed simultaneously with, the dinosaurs. (Which, according to the Young Earth Creationist Museum, is exactly what happened. Because fuck science!) The Cocoa Pebbles variety of the candy cane tastes like a crunchy Tootsie Roll, a sort of weird abomination that should not be and yet you can’t look away (a bit like the end of The Substance). The Fruity Pebbles iteration actually tastes EXACTLY like Fruity Pebbles, which … congratulations, I guess? It feels like AI-generated art: no one wants it, no one needs it, I really don’t want to think about the environmental costs of making it, but I guess someone did it anyway.