Valentine’s Day is nearly
here. Shelves in stores are crowded with red and pink containers. Much of the
space is taken up by chocolate in heart-shaped boxes, but there are also a lot
of bags of what is basically heart-shaped sugar. The most Valentine’s-y of these
are the candy hearts.
Candy hearts are so
appealing that you can find them depicted on fabrics, wrapping paper, and cards.
I guess Hershey’s kisses show up once in a while, but candy hearts are a much
more popular Valentine’s Day icon.
What’s so appealing about
them? I think it’s the messages. Without messages, candy hearts would be just another
heart-shaped candy that isn’t chocolate. Boring.
But what is it about the
messages that makes candy hearts fun? After all, they aren’t exactly poetry.
Mostly candy hearts offer a random assortment of sentimental cliches and
catch-phrases, nothing particularly interesting or original.
I think what makes them
fun is the very fact that you get such an assortment. You can pick through the
hearts till you find just the right message to hand to a particular person. It
might be a compliment: "Shining Star", "You Are Nice", or "Dear One". It might be a request: "Be My Friend", "Let's Talk", "Dance With Me." It might even be a question: "Will You Marry Me?"
Alternatively, you can draw
one at random and be surprised. It’s a bit like a fortune cookie.
It occurs to me that,
like many other things, candy hearts lend themselves to stories. What if
someone pulled a candy heart out of a jar, just for a quick mouthful of sugar,
and discovered that it said something really unexpected?
“You are being watched.”
Or: “She’s lying.”
Or: “Look up.”
In fact, candy hearts (or
something like them) do show up in stories. In Mary Poppins Comes Back by P. L. Travers, Mary takes the children
to a very odd store where she asks for “an ounce of Conversations.”
"'Are those the
Conversations?' asked Jane, pointing to the Jar. 'They look more like sweets.'
'So they are, Miss! They’re
Conversation Sweets,' said Uncle Dodger, dusting the jar with his apron."
Jane gets "a flat
star-shaped sweet rather like a peppermint" with the words "You're My Fancy."
Michael pulls out a shell-shaped one with "I Love You. Do You Love Me?" The
twins, John and Barbara, are given "Deedle deedle dumpling" and "Shining-bright
and airy", but Mary Poppins's sweet is shaped like a half-moon and reads, "Ten
o'clock to-night."
Naturally, Mary Poppins
explains nothing, and equally naturally, strange things happen that
night at ten o'clock.
The tales of Raggedy Ann also involve a candy heart, if I remember correctly. A disaster leads to
Raggedy Ann being restuffed, and the woman repairing her puts in a candy
heart that says “I love you.” Later, Raggedy Ann falls in some water, and she tells
her friends that since the candy has melted, the "I love you" is now spread
throughout her insides.*
But enough about stories.
Setting aside the content of the messages for the moment, how well do candy
hearts succeed at being Valentine decorations? The colors are fine and so is
the shape, but I have mixed feelings about the way they are printed. I
like the large ones from Brach's because they have longer messages, but the
words look like they came from a bad dot-matrix printer. On the positive side,
I suspect whatever technique they are now using allows them to vary the
messages more, which is all to the good. Maybe the quality of the print will
improve over the coming years. The Sweetheart brand small hearts have a long
way to go—they are often barely readable.
And how well do candy
hearts succeed at being candy—that
is, how do they taste? I bought the small Sweethearts because Sweethearts are
made by the New England Confectionery Company, which makes NECCO wafers. I like
NECCO wafers, and the hearts looked as though they were made of the same stuff, so
I expected them to taste the same.
When I tasted the various
colors, though, I wondered if they'd changed the flavors of their hearts. I
don't remember green being green-apple flavored, and the blue… did they even
have blue hearts earlier? A quick check on-line shows that the flavors changed some years ago, which makes me wonder when I last bought Sweethearts. (They contain
gelatin, so maybe not since my daughter went vegetarian?)
Since I don't like the
flavors very much, and certainly don't need the extra sugar, I wonder if it
wouldn't be better to skip the candy altogether and substitute colorful paper
hearts or wooden hearts with messages on the reverse. (I'm sure these must
exist.) But then what does your friend or sweetie do when you hand them a
suitably-messaged heart? Keep it forever? Smile appreciation and then toss it in
the trash? (Or back in the bowl, if it's a wooden heart?) There's something to
be said for being able to pop the message in one's mouth after reading it.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Till next post.
* Build-a-Bear uses a
non-edible version of this trick.
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