The Best Easter Candy

I really think Cadbury Creme Eggs used to be bigger.

That's not some dumb thing like saying how my yard was really huge when I was a kid and then going back to see the house I grew up in and saying, oh, man, that yard is small, I guess they were right, you can't go home again. I don't roll like that.

Although my yard was really huge when I was a kid. So were snowdrifts. I remember one winter when the snowdrifts were, like, 10 feet tall and we made snowforts out of them. Then, all my life, I saw the snowdrifts and they were small and I thought, maybe it's just my memory, thinking they were big because I was really little, or something like that, but, no, it turns out I was right. I was right because this year, in Wisconsin, we set a new record for snowfall (nearly 100 inches, including the 7 we got yesterday, the first day of Spring), and the old record was set in 1978, when I was a kid, so Memory: 1, Thomas Wolfe: 0-- the snowdrifts really were bigger when I was a kid.

So were Cadbury Creme Eggs, which are The Best Easter Candy. And even though they are no longer big enough, they are still great and I want to celebrate them. In celebrating them, I want to not just mention how great they taste, but also I want to celebrate and exalt Cadbury Creme Eggs as the incredible innovation that they are.

Most of life is very boring and static; very little is new. We get all swept up in the innovations of an iPhone and forget that, really, an iPhone is nothing all that new. It's a phone, after all, and they've been around for, what, 400 years? Didn't Columbus use a phone to tell the Queen he'd made one small step or something? iPhones are not that big a deal.

Most of life, in fact, just keeps remaining the same even though we think it's all new and exciting. I hate to burst your bubble, but there's only been like 4 new things in the last century. The rest is all just modifications of things we had before. The car? Not new. It was a modification of the stagecoach; the only thing that changed was the power source. Space shuttle? Not new-- just an airplane that went into space. Television? Just radio with pictures. iPods? Gramophones with smaller earpieces. The method of storing music and playing it back may be new, but the idea of storing music and playing it back goes back to player pianos.

See what I mean? We think things are new and exciting but they've been around for decades or centuries and aren't new at all. It's all just a fresh coat of paint and some slick hucksterism. Like I said, only four things in the last century were "new," meaning that they were something completely unheard of in human history, a major leap into an entirely new direction of existence. Those things are:

1. Airplanes.

2. Jell-O.

3. Christopher Walken.

and 4. Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Cadbury Creme Eggs took candy into a metaphysical dimension of eating. Before Cadbury Creme Eggs -- and I base this statement on exhaustive research involving trying to remember from when I was a kid-- candy bars were all rectangular and filled with nougat or nuts or dried rice or sometimes caramel. They weren't shaped like anything, and they had identifiable candy ingredients, and they were more or less boring and adult like. Candy bars, while tasty, had all the thrill and fun of a cardboard box full of tax receipts. Oh, great, a Milky Way. Well, here goes.

And what is nougat? I don't want to get sidetracked. But I've always wondered.

Sure, there were seasonal candies that were shaped like things -- chocolate santas and pumpkins- but they were just candy bars in dressy outfits. They were still identifiable as a candy bar and still had the same boring ingredients.

Also, do not mention "Peeps" to me. They aren't "candy." "Peeps" technically are a different lifeform. You'll see. You think they're candy and you're having fun microwaving them, but they're breeding and they'll take over the world. Where do you think that Gene Roddenberry got the idea for Tribbles? From Peeps. Look it up.

Candy was boring, and then along came Cadbury Creme Eggs, and it was like -- to use a hackneyed cliche -- when the color came on in "The Wizard of Oz." Or, to use a less hackneyed expression, it was like [SPOILER ALERT] that moment when Bruce Willis realizes he's dead.

Does anyone else, like me, have trouble remembering characters' names in movies? Every movie I see, the character might as well be named "Bruce Willis," assuming that's who's in the movie, because I never remember what the character's name was. So I just happily assume that Bruce Willis played "Bruce Willis" in The Sixth Sense.

He was "Dr. Malcolm Crowe," by the way.

Cadbury Creme Eggs were like that. No, they were not like finding out that Bruce Willis' character was named "Dr. Malcolm Crowe." Nor were they like realizing you were dead. That's just an example because I think we need to rely a little less on that whole "world turning into color" crutch. Cadbury Creme Eggs were like realizing with a rush that life is suddenly very unusual and exciting. Here's this candy that's not square and not shaped like Santa; it's shaped like actual food. And you bite into it and whoa, there's something in there but it's not peanuts, it's white and there's a yolk -- it really was like a real egg and how'd they do that? Plus it was really good!

It was an eye opener, that's for sure. Candy was no longer stultifyingly jammed into categories, bars could no longer be stacked up, suddenly the whole world was opening up with the possibilities: candy could be shaped like real things! Candy could include things that were not rice krispies! Candy could be fun again.

No, I'm not overselling this. The most significant innovation in candy before the Creme Egg was "mini" candy bars. If you are old enough to remember, then you know I'm right: you would go to the Piggly-Wiggly with your mom and she'd say you could get some candy, and there they were: a bunch of bar-shaped things that all looked and tasted about the same and it didn't really matter which one you got, it was chocolatey, sure, but it was boring.

Then, after Creme Eggs threw the door open, candy became fun and exciting. It came in more colorful packages. It got sour and sweet. It got mixed up with new ingredients. It was shaped differently. It changed, for the better. Do you think we'd have Nerds, Peanut Butter Twix, Bubble Tape, or Chocolate Oranges, if Cadbury Creme Eggs hadn't been invented? I doubt it. They were, are, one of the few "new" things you will ever see in your lifetime, one of the things that altered the world as we know it.

So, Cadbury Creme Egg, even though you have shrunk over my lifetime, I salute you as The Best Easter Candy.