When I was a child, the holiday season meant the week between Christmas and New Years’. Now, thanks to modern marketing it more or less means Halloween to Super Bowl Sunday, or at least until the end of the College bowl season. Since the blessed season devoted to our god Excessive Spending is beginning in a few weeks, I want to take a moment and offer some advice on one of its most crucial elements.
Yes, I’m talking about M&Ms.
In my life I have eaten more than my body weight in M&Ms. This dietary staple, this American contribution to the pantheon of world cuisine, is now the cruel victim of Holiday over-marketing. I am here to help.
A PAUSE THAT REFRESEHES: One M&M is nothing special. It is when you take more than one, by bunches or by serial popping, that you feel the joy. Each M&M has a hard sugar coating, and at first the taste is just pure sugar. Then, one after another after another after another after another, the chocolate builds up in your mouth, your taste buds exalt in the milky chocolaty flavor, and everything is smooth, so smooth, interrupted only by the crackle of each new morsel. Did I mention that I like M&Ms?
They are one of my kitch pleasures. I am an elitist. I admit it. My bookshelves are loaded with Pulizer and Nobel laureates, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Philosophy is summer reading. I won’t listen to Top 10 radio, and the Nightly Network News is too simplistic for my highfalutin taste. No Budweiser, I take microbrews. No Wild Turkey for me; I’ll have a single malt scotch, thanks.
But I’ll throw $200 worth of Godiva Chocolate overboard for a 5 pound bag of M&Ms.
My daughter used to call M&Ms “nemis.” At two years old she would wait up for me to come home from work, sometimes until 10 o’clock at night, so I could feed her nemis on the sofa as we watched blissful television. These days I have two offspring that assault me for M&Ms. Whenever I sit down in my living room ottoman after dinner with a handful, my kids are on me in a cracklin' instant. My daughter says, “I just want to sit with you daddy, I love you daddy,” and starts prying my fingers apart. My son says nothing but simply barges onto my lap, tossing newspaper, book, or drink aside. Then I am pecked clean. I have to remember to slip a few candies into my shirt pocket to insure that I will get at least one for myself.
When I was a kid, there were only two types of M & Ms. Plain M & Ms came in a chocolate bag and in red, yellow, brown, green, and tan. Peanut M & Ms came in a yellow bag and in red, yellow, brown, and green. I knew this so well from personal experience that, in the early 1990s as I watched an episode of Jeopardy, I correctly answered that tan is the one color that comes as plain only. And I knew this by picturing a handful of M & Ms in my mind and counting up the colors.
It seemed like a perfect world, but in 1993 Mars Company started fooling with perfection. It couldn’t help itself, I know. Every American company thinks it has to go New-and-Improved! every couple of years to scare off competition. But I would have rather they took a chisel to the Pieta to “fix a couple of things.” You can’t eat the Pieta, thought I don’t doubt someone makes one in chocolate. Anyway, Mars gave into the pressure to perfect the perfect, and started a campaign, allowing users – ahh, consumers – to vote on a new color. Blue won the day, and tan was eliminated, along with the basis of the Jeopardy question, because blue was added to both peanut and plain.
So far, so good, but the Mars marketing department was by no means done. In 1996 Mars introduced the M&M mini, an abomination. Minis are way-too-small versions of the plain candies. The regular candies have the perfect sugar-coating-to-chocolate ratio. Minis have less chocolate, because they are smaller, but the sugar coat is still the same thickness, and this upsets the balance. They taste like sugar cubes. You have to eat a hundred to really taste the chocolate, and I won’t tell you how I came to that determination.
In 1998 we got crispy M&Ms. They taste like Milk Duds to me. If I wanted Milk Duds I would have bought Milk Duds.
In 2002 the purple M&M was introduced. Also a work of Satan. One of the nice things about M&Ms is the sharp, primary color look. Purple is so, well, shady. Instead of standing out as a clear color itself it bridges the gap between the bright red, yellow, and green and the mysterious dark brown. We don’t need ecumenical candies in this world. What’s next, fuchsia?
Then came dark chocolate last year. This was an innovation I was looking forward to. I like dark chocolate – in fact, I prefer dark over milk chocolate every time unless it is in an M&M. Dark chocolate M&Ms are fair. Unfortunately, the sugar coat cuts the bitterness of the dark chocolate and makes the dark M&Ms taste very much like the plains. The only way to get a dark chocolate experience with dark M&Ms is to chain-pop them into your mouth until enough chocolate builds up that it overwhelms the sugar coat. I have tried this a few times and it is a pleasant experience, but I do not recommend the chain-pop technique to amateurs without first consulting an experienced professional. And never chain-pop drunk. Trust me.
Another recent "improvement" has been the seasonal colors, which, come to think of it, is the reason I started writing this article in the first place. I hate them. For Christmas we get bags of green and red M&Ms. For Easter it is pastel pink and green. And for Halloween last year it was black and white, which looked creepy, so this year Mars changed it to orange and black. I have a bag of the orange and blacks in my cupboard right now.
The problem with these seasonal packages is that they invariably do not taste as good as the regular bags. I do not know why, but I can hazard a guess: They are old. Anything that is only sold once a year tends to be made months in advance. It is much like Christmas TV specials. You get to see the precious Osmond family dancing around in the snow and singing carols with cheeks pinked by the chill, but you and I both know that right after the taping of the show was completed the whole bunch stripped down to their shorts and went out into the 100-degree Los Angeles July sun. That’s how it goes. The folks in the M&Ms factory are mixing up batches of holiday cheer in late April, probably. Then the product sits and sits, and by the time I pick up a pack they are old enough to apply for Social Security benefits.
On the other hand, the plains just keep moving year round. They are never out of style so they do not sit on the shelf (or in storage) in the off-season. In fact, I am willing to bet that plain secular M&Ms are even fresher than usual in the holiday season because Mars probably cuts back production to make room for the seasonals. This means there aren’t enough plains to sit on the shelf for long.
Of course, that is just a guess – so don’t sue me, Mars – but I am telling you as an M&M connoisseur that the holiday M&Ms don’t taste as fresh as the regular, secular kind. They taste dusty. They don’t crackle the same between my teeth. And when the shell comes off that milk chocolate flavor doesn’t jump out to get me like a sex-starved widow dropping her robe.
Take my word for it. When you are out shopping for chocolate for the holidays, pick up the regular M&Ms. If you are one of those Martha Steward Christmas types that has to have that color coordination going, get the regulars anyway and take out everything except the red and green. You can ship the detritus to my address.
And please, for Halloween, stay away from the M&M Minis. They are godawful. Don’t make me come looking for you. I have a grim reaper costume, and the scythe is real.