Trick or treating in Maine in the 60's was lovely...Simple costumes that we worked diligently on for at least a week. planning, using scraps of material from the tailor's discard bin at our parent's dry cleaning business. Stapling and glueing, borrowing our mother make-up when she wasn't looking because she didn't appreciate her red lipstick being used to cover such a large area of our face that it suddenly was only 1 inch tall when she opened it to use the day after Halloween.
We never had warnings to not wear dark clothes or have to check our bag of candy for dangerous anything. All we had to worry about was which house would have the best candy and goodies. We carefully planned it out by the street, starting our canvasing just as it was getting dark with large decorated grocery bag in hand and always a costume that was overly long and easy to trip over. We crossed street after street or passed piles of burning leaves that everyone always had burning eerily in front of their house.
Last night, at about 2:00 a.m I woke up and couldn’t go back to
sleep. Normally I give myself an hour of trying to go back to sleep
before I give up and go downstairs to watch TV. Last night I knew it
just wasn’t gonna happen. 
It was warm in the living room and our two Portugese water dogs,
Stachmo and Gabby followed me, hopped up on the couch, and snuggled
close. After five minutes of channel surfing, I landed on a documentary
with the intriguing title: The Chocolate Wars. It was about the rivalry
between the altruistic Milton Hershey and the odious Forrest Mars, son
of Frank Mars, the founder of Mars Candy Company.
Candy has been a bond between me and my pal Joy since we first became
best friends in sixth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary School in
Beverly Hills, California. Sure, there’s been humor, loyalty, shared
heart-throbs, and tears…but from the get-go, there were shared Nestle
Crunch candy bars filled with crinkly chocolate that we bought every
day as we walked home from school together. It became a ritual,
peeling off the blue and white wrapper, then the foil, and eating the
crunchy bar while hysterically laughing over some inside joke that was
funny only to ourselves. But it was better that way.
My husband Mike points out that the room goes silent as I watch a quivering gooey strand of icing bridge a hunk of pastry being pried apart by delicate hands in an Entenman's commercial. And when a pool of thick, rich Dove chocolate swirls around and folds itself magically over a brick of vanilla ice cream, my eyes glaze over. Then, when the caramel and chocolate of a Milky Way is fully exposed in delectable close up, my jaw goes slack. He tells me to face it: these commercials are, for me, like watching porn. Yes, I embarrassedly admit that I have fallen prey to the sexualized enticements of sugary things. 
It happens every year. About a month before Christmas, I buy at least a couple of boxes of little candy canes. I have plans to hang them over the edge of cups of hot cocoa. I place a large bowl of them on the kitchen island, ready to be snatched up and chewed. There are all kinds of ways I use them during the holidays. But, it never fails. I always buy way too many. And, every year at this time, I pull out the leftover candy canes and begin to stir them into cookie dough. This year is no different. But this year, the cookies are Italian-style twice-baked cookies – biscotti.