Cozi Blog

Dear Makers of Fun Size Candy Bars,

I am old. Middle aged, as one of my high school students told me two years ago, when I had significantly less gray hair and fewer wrinkles than I do today. A sign of how bad things have gotten: I now have bangs because my forehead looks like an elephant’s ankle. Every day is a bad forehead day, and I’m soon going to have to grow a beard to hide what’s happening with my neck.

Despite my age, however, I do remember the glory days of Halloween, when a child had to trick-or-treat carefully because of the razor blades in the apples and the LSD in the Mickey Mouse temporary tattoos. Both were urban legends, but hey! It was Halloween. The scariest day of the year (after school picture day). This sort of thing only helped the holiday live up to its terrifying potential. Fun size my life!

Back then, fun size candy bars actually were sort of fun. They were heavy enough to make the trick-or-treat bag/pillowcase bruise your ankles, and they were just long enough to seem like they could conceal something deadly.

Fun size candy bars today should be called dollhouse size candy bars. It’s not just my failing eyesight, here. These things are tiny. Lilliputian. My children are suffering because I have to steal two and three candy bars at a time to feel satisfied/protect their teeth/do my part in staving off the childhood obesity epidemic. By tomorrow, their trick-or-treat bags will be empty black holes collapsing in on themselves.

Meanwhile, so many other things in my life and the lives of other parents are now full size.

I’m talking about the size of the car insurance bill, which will now go up because of the minor fender-bender a certain beloved member of my household had last week.

I am also talking about the laundry pile, which, if it were a volcano, would be large enough to be classified as a federal emergency management administration hazard area.

And I’m talking about the parent’s to-do list, which keeps growing like a giant pumpkin. Just this week, I’ve had to track down flu shots and fill out legal waivers for multiple activities, one of which was a birthday party. We’re living in the fun size times of legal liability, flu pandemics and other horrors. Doesn’t it make you miss a good, old-fashioned epidemic, or even the simple elegance of a hidden razor blade?

So this is my request to you, oh makers of Fun Size candy bars. Instead of using your educations and talents to shrink one of life’s sweet pleasures, please direct your attention elsewhere. Make poverty fun size. Make wars fun size. Or, if you want to start really big, make my waistline fun size.