I started my Countdown To Halloween thirty days ago with a personal recollection and a photo from my earliest Halloween. I’d like to close out my month-long celebration in much the same way – with something fun and personal from my past that ties into the fun of Halloween candy and Halloween candy packaging. So today I’m going to explore a pair of photos from one of my childhood Halloweens, circa 1975 or 1976.
I wish I had photos from some of the other Halloweens I celebrated as a kid, but at least I have these.
In these photos, you’ll see me in my Ben Cooper Batman costume, and my big brother Jeff decked out in his Ben Cooper Six-Million Dollar Man getup (That’s my grandmother working the sewing machine in the background and my mother is the one taking the photo). Here we are:
This second photo allows me to have a little CollectingCandy fun, because as you can see, we had a card table set up and we were actively sorting out the goodies we had grabbed during our evening of trick-or-treating. Well, my brother was sorting – I appear to be trying to scrape-and-consume the caramel off of a caramel apple while mixing in a few Brach’s cinnamon imperials for good measure (yummy!). Here’s a closeup of the booty:
So, as I look across this image – what do I see? Well, I see Snickers (Fun-Size) and 3 Musketeers, a Hershey Bar, Milk Duds, Sugar Babies, Reese’s, Double Bubble gum, Dum Dum pops, and Brach’s Candy Corn boxes. Lots of awesome stuff.
Having identified a number of the items in the photo, I wanted to see what I had in my collection to match it. Let’s take a look:
I searched for the Sugar Babies small box in the photo (which seems to have some white-and-red holiday graphics on the back) but the closest I could find was this standard version:
And finally, the Brach’s Candy Corn box – one of my fonder confectionery memories of the period:
Those are the pieces I could identify from this nearly 40-year-old snapshot and match up with pieces from my collection. Identifying candy items from old photos is a pretty fun thing to try to do, and a fun way to put things onto a collector’s want-list. It’s fun – but it’s not always easy. Photos are often blurry and of course finding the things later on can prove to be a years’ long quest.
Halloween really is the best holiday for a candy fan or a candy collector – so it’s somewhat bittersweet to find ourselves at the end. I just can’t believe it’s Halloween already. It’s been a tremendous amount of fun assembling these 31 posts this month, and I’m glad I could share them all with you. I hope you’ve enjoyed visiting and checking out my take on a Countdown To Halloween as much as I’ve enjoyed bringing it to you.
And that’s everything for today’s post. I hope everyone out there has a happy and safe Halloween, and that you get lots of yummy candy with cool wrappers!
See you next time!
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Today’s post has been part of CollectingCandy.com’s Countdown to Halloween. To check out other sites celebrating Halloween all month long, check out the official Halloween Countdown site.
Another great post.
Loved to see your detective work.
Those old candy wrappers sure bring back memories. I recognized them all but the Brach Candy corn boxes and the Fright Bites.
And sitting on the table behind grandma, the fashion statement of the day — a Budweiser beer can crocheted hat.