By SUSAN DROMEY HEETER, Joyful Musings

This Thanksgiving I have been tasked with bringing hors d’oeuvres to our family gathering. I’ll put together a variety of cheeses, a plethora of crackers, some veggies and dip, perhaps some hummus.  It’ll be welcomed and eaten and enjoyed and probably forgotten by Christmas.  Alas, today I muse joyfully on the other platter of which I have been tasked: the Candy Platter.

The Candy Platter will have color, individual wrapping and enough sugar to create cavities in 10,000 molars.  I’ll search high and low for the sweets I know will not only be eaten on Thanksgiving but taken for later. Perhaps I’ll provide bags for the ride home, Black Friday, the holiday season.

I’ll find the candy that delights including Bit o’ Honeys, Swedish Fish, Caramel Creams.  I’ll include chocolates such as Heath Bars, Charleston Chews, Twix. The platter will be a taste of the past, a reminder of the 60’s and 70’s when candy was the absolute highlight of a day. 

My friend Joan and I would walk home from school and there was nothing so great as when we had a quarter or two and could fortify our journey with a good sugar high.  We’d stop at Cumberland Farms.  “Norm”, the friendly guy with a horrible toupee, would take our cash and we’d squander the Sprees and the Necco Wafers – enjoying every bite, savoring the tastes that would lead to crowns and root canals in our future.

But, we did not care. And, as Thanksgiving is a time of memories and gratitude, family and abundance, it is the ideal time for returning to old friends like Butterfingers, DOTS, Mike and Ikes, Sugar Babies.  And while certainly pumpkin and apple pies are the stars of Thanksgiving, who will be eating a slice of pie while waiting in the line at the DMV or driving home from work? Candy lasts and fortifies, not necessarily nutritionally or dental hygienically, rather, joyfully and sugarly.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, Joyful Musers, celebrate and eat, talk and laugh, sit and share.  And if candy is a part of your holiday, I suspect it will be even better. I muse joyfully you may have a Candy Platter at your gathering. If one is not planned, make time to gather the requisite treats, I muse joyfully you do. Joyful Thanksgiving, Musers, make it a good one.

Susan Dromey Heeter is a writer from Dover who recently let her hair go au natural white. Writing has been her passion since her English majoring days at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.  Dromey Heeter has lived in The Netherlands, Alaska and currently basks in all things New England, including the frigid winters. An avid swimmer, Dromey Heeter’s great passion is to bring back body surfing as most children have no idea how to ride waves without ridiculous boogie boards.