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A timeline of Halloween treats
Tracking the spookiest holiday's signature candies from 1900 to 2000
Hello, Snackers. It’s almost All Hallows’ Eve, so let’s see what we would have been eating over the years.
Plenty of other publications have covered the history of trick-or-treating in great detail, so I won’t bother with that one. Instead, here’s an extremely unscientific investigation of what Halloween candy people were eating in each decade of the twentieth century, based on a random sample of print articles and ads.
1900s
Pittsburgh Press, 1905
Buttercups, molasses kisses, chocolate-covered marshmallows, Scotch kisses, peanut bars.
1910s
Minneapolis Journal, 1916
Chocolate Tinagling (??), nougats, butterscotch, marshmallows.
1920s
Baltimore Sun, 1924
Candy corn, candy witches, candy pumpkins, chocolate novelties, coconut strips.
1930s
Hartford Courant, 1932
Jelly drops, chocolate bon bons, novelties.
1940s
Kansas City Star, 1940
Jellies, burn peanuts, hard candies, novelty pumpkins.
1950s
LIFE, 1958
Individually-wrapped candy bars, candy corn, chocolate mints, lollipops. Incidentally, I did some quick searching around and 1958 appears to be the first year that plastic pumpkin buckets were in widespread production and use. Here’s an ad for the buckets from that year.
1960s
LIFE, 1962
Individually-wrapped candy bars, chewing gum, caramel rolls, lollipops.
1970s
Charlotte News, 1973
For reasons I don’t understand, hard candies dominated the Halloween candy ads in the publications for which there’s a digital archive. I presume consumers weren’t actually going back to the old-school candies in great numbers, but the available ads indicate that this is exactly what happened. [SHRUG EMOJI]
1980s
From Working Mother, 1986
Toffee, caramel, fudge (and plenty of mini candy bars, not pictured)
1990s
New York Magazine, 1996
Extra-novel novelties, including edible bubbles. Apparently.
Happy snacking!
—Doug
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