The One Candy You’ll Never Get in Your Trick-or-Treat Sack

October 28, 2023 — I wasn’t planning on stopping at the PEZ Visitor Center. My girls and I were fleeing the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, New York, and were on a mission to see the original Annabelle doll at a casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. But as we neared the town of Orange, Connecticut, a well-placed road sign tipped the girls off to the existence of that wonderland of cartridge-candy. They clamored for me to stop, and zero chance was I going to say no to them, even if we were stuck between two demons. It was just a great and obvious idea. Plus, I had the pull of nostalgia from having visited the place a decade ago.

So we put off seeing the cursed object for an hour to check out a bunch of candy-filled ones.

And when I say decade, oddly enough, I mean decade. I posted about my original visit to the PEZ Visitor Center in September 2013. At that point, I only had one daughter, who was three years old at the time. Now she’s a month from fourteen and has two siblings. A visit to the PEZ visitor center was vastly overdue.

But, instead of rehashing that experience (they were pretty similar—with the difference of a few exhibits), I thought that in honor of the season, I would post some of the Halloween-related stuff we saw there. Like this:

On our way out, we bought three coffee-cup-sized buckets of mixed PEZ and three dispensers. We didn’t use the dispensers at all, just ate the candy by the handful as we continued our trek to see Annabelle. As much as I love PEZ, it was never meant to be eaten by the handful. We all ate so much of it, the sweets started to taste like soap and our tongues were diseased with blue and red and yellow die.

It might be another decade before I make it there again.