by Jim Gaffigan
As an adult, I always wondered who was buying the candy that seemed to be sold everywhere. I never understood why they even had candy on display in front of the cash register at drugstores. Who is that for? “Yeah, while you’re ringing up my diabetes medication, throw in this Snickers.” They put that candy right at a child’s eye level so the parent will be fumbling with their wallet at checkout and their kids beg them for the candy and they give in out of frustration. Not me. I am not falling for that evil marketing scheme like those other suckers. I would never purchase candy, and obviously I would never give candy to my children.
Yet for some reason, now that I have kids, I eat candy all the time. I’ve never bought the candy, but it is constantly ending up in my house—it’s my children’s candy that we have confiscated for safekeeping. Suddenly I have this big bowl of temptation in my cupboard beckoning me to eat it. It doesn’t have to be good candy. I’ve eaten an entire bag of stale gummy bears on more than one occasion—in the past month.
I don’t think of it as stealing. Hey, it’s my home, and those kids don’t pay rent. Most of the time I don’t even want to eat their candy, but late at night I’m confronted with the predicament: eat my kids’ candy or feel my feelings. Eating the candy always seems to win. Now, there are parents who would not raid their children’s stash, and they are called weirdos or anorexic. What would you do if you had a bag of mini chocolate bars in your house? Let your kids eat it? Throw it away? I’m pretty sure throwing away candy is a crime in some states. Let’s be serious, you would eat the candy. You would eat the candy to save your children’s lives. It’s a heroic action, actually. (By the way, I’m not eating all of my children’s candy. When I pilfer their Halloween bags every year, I take only the Snickers, Reese’s, and Heath Bars. I thoughtfully leave them the Now and Laters, Wax Lips, and the wrappers. I’m not a criminal.)
Future generations will look back on our propensity to give candy to children as something preposterous, like giving cigarettes to babies. Sometimes it feels like candy is being forced on parents. My son’s preschool had an annual fundraiser that involved selling a case of chocolate bars. Really? Chocolate bars? Part of why we are sending our kids to preschool is so they wouldn’t be at home begging for candy. This always felt comparable to raising money to fight heart disease by selling steaks. A three-year-old is not going to go around selling chocolate bars. I certainly am not going to go around selling chocolate bars. The solution? Write a check, and Dad eats a case of chocolate bars.
Don’t worry, my kids barely notice any of their candy is gone. Recently my eight-year-old, Marre, asked, “What happened to my Valentine’s Day candy?” Like a good parent, I lied: “I don’t know.” Not missing a beat, she responded, “Oh well, I’ll just have some of my Easter candy.”
There’s always another birthday party, another holiday. Birthdays and holidays are just drug mules smuggling candy to our children, and we are the corrupt DEA agents fighting the losing war on candy.
For today’s kids, it’s an abundant candy universe. They don’t even have to try for it; they are of the “treat bag” generation. Sure, my children still beg us for it, but that is because they know we have it. When I was a kid, we never had candy in our house. It was a reserved fantasy that came true on Halloween. You would binge on it one night a year after trick-or-treating, have a horrible stomachache the next day, and spend the rest of the year dreaming about candy. I remember watching a Rolo commercial as a kid and longingly thinking, “One day …”
Before I wrap this essay up and eat some of my kids’ candy, I do need to address two candies in particular. One is evil, and one is a lifesaver, and no, I’m not talking about Life Savers.
Gum
Probably the most destructive candy is chewing gum. Ever give a three-year-old a piece of gum? It always seems like a good idea: it will keep them occupied; it’s not candy, so they won’t be ingesting handfuls of it, and all little kids absolutely love gum. If they know you have a pack of gum, you suddenly have absolute power. You can lord it over them: “If you behave in the supermarket, I will give you a piece of gum.” Kids will do anything for a piece of gum.
Of course, you think that the worst thing that can happen is that they will swallow the gum. “Don’t swallow the gum! It takes seven years to digest!” In reality, you should encourage them to swallow the gum, because the worst thing that can happen is them losing the gum. A lost piece of chewed gum will wreak havoc on everything in sight and end up in places that will shock you. Kids cannot keep gum in their mouth. Half the fun of gum to a three-year-old is stretching it out, rolling it in a ball like chewable Play-Doh, and eventually losing it somewhere. You will discover that that piece of gum somehow has fused itself to the butt of your pants and become intermingled with the fabric of your jeans forever. Give a kid gum, and the bad karma is instantaneous. That gum is guaranteed to somehow find its way into the clothes dryer and ruin all the school uniforms at once.
The other day I submitted to the begging of my three-year-old, Katie, and gave her a piece of gum that five seconds later was firmly embedded in her hair. She had to get that emergency haircut with that isolated spike that screams, “I was playing with scissors,” or “My idiot dad gave me gum.” I don’t want to get all political, but I am definitely pro–gum control.
Lollipops
My kids love lollipops, but not as much as I love lollipops. My love of lollipops is not about eating them; it’s about how quiet they make my children. It is virtually impossible for a three-year-old to whine and complain with a lollipop in her mouth. “Waaah! I don’t want to sit in the ba—[suck, suck]. This one is cherry.”
If you ever take your kids to a situation where they must be quiet, bring lollipops. They’re like flavored muzzles. Mothers-to-be should be given bouquets of lollipops at baby showers. At the hospital, people should hand lollipops to new fathers and say, “Here, you’re going to need this.” It’s the parent’s secret weapon. What about the sugar? Well, Dr. John makes sugar-free lollipops. (No, he did not pay me to write that. He does not even know who I am. I don’t even know if Dr. John is a real doctor or if he even exists. I have to assume lollipop Dr. John is different from the musician Dr. John, who sang that song “Right Place, Wrong Time.” By coincidence, that song could be used to describe any parent with a kid who needs a lollipop. Dr. John is most likely not the musician and just the “Mama Celeste” of lollipops. Of course, if you do exist, Dr. John, I think you should send me a case of sugar-free lollipops as a reward for mentioning you.)
A rare moment of silence from Katie and Jack.
There is no sugar in Dr. John’s lollipops. They are sweetened with a natural sweetener that we will likely find out in ten years is a hundred times worse for you than sugar. The sugar predicament is strange. It’s always like, “Sugar’s bad! Sugar will rot your teeth and make you fat! Use these yellow packets instead.” Then, like six months later: “Don’t use those yellow packets—they cause cancer! They even cause worse cancer than those pink packets of fake sugar we told you caused cancer six months ago.” You are always forced to face the dilemma “Do I eat the sugar that will make me fat, or do I use this other stuff that will kill me? Hmmm. Eh, what’s a little cancer? Cancer makes you lose weight, right?” What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Lollipops. Why did you change the subject and start talking about that other thing that no one wants to say out loud? After all, this is a book about kids and being a good-looking dad.
’Tis the Season
Kids love holidays. As a kid, I used to measure the year by which holiday was coming up. The most important time of the year was the “Holiday Season”—the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. It encompassed so many holidays, including Hanukkah, Christmas, that African one that’s even harder to spell than Hanukkah, and many others. That time period is clearly a season of holidays. A holiday season. No matter what faith you belong to or what tradition you follow, everyone is partying. You’re shopping, you’re cooking, you
’re getting together with family, you’re eating food that’s bad for you, you’re eating more food that’s bad for you, and of course you’re eating food that’s bad for you.
Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they’ve learned during the rest of the year. They don’t go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia. The “Holiday Season” was always the longest one, so it was obviously my favorite.
Now what’s happened since I was a kid is that all holidays have become “holiday seasons.” If you don’t believe me, go into any drugstore. The day after New Year’s Day, the Valentine’s Day aisle appears. The day after Valentine’s Day, the same aisle is filed with shamrocks and leprechauns.
Halloween is no longer one night. It’s a week if you’re lucky. A month if you live in New York City. I don’t know how this happened or what the logic was. “Well, Halloween lands on a Tuesday, so let’s have the kids dress up every day for a month.” There are even Halloween greeting cards now. As a result of this extended Halloween “season,” kids end up having more than one Halloween costume, like they are competing in a beauty pageant. “What costume do you want to wear to school?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to the parade?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to trick-or-treat?” Then “What costume do you want to wear to the swimsuit competition?” When I was growing up, I barely had a Halloween costume. I mostly remember cutting a couple of holes in a sheet for eyes and going as a ghost. Wait, maybe that was just in that Charlie Brown’s Halloween special. I just remember going as either a ghost or a bum. Not a homeless person, but a bum. It was a less sensitive era.
Now there is mandatory parental participation in holidays when you have young children. Of course you want to share the experience with them, but no matter how jaded you might be, you just dare not ruin it for them. The tradition of chopping down a pine tree and putting it in your living room may seem like the behavior of a drunk guy, but you do it sober. You carve pumpkins, paint eggs, anything for your kids. Somehow a couple of years ago, I even became one of those dads who dresses up with his kids at Halloween.
This is how much I love my kids.
I can’t believe it either. Yes, it was Jeannie’s idea, and I’ve done it more than once. I just wish I had known before how similar Captain Hook looks to Captain Morgan when you run into drunk people who really like rum on Halloween.
Even though my kids still measure the year by holidays, there is barely any downtime between them. Add in birthday parties, and the fun never stops. If the holidays used to be a time that kids unlearned their good habits, now the five minutes between holidays are the only time for them to unlearn their bad habits. This holiday conspiracy created by the evil drugstore corporate giants is threatening to create an entire generation of spoiled monsters. Just another hurdle for parents who don’t want a house full of these holiday-possessed demons but also don’t want to be the only parents who threaten to “cancel Christmas” every time their kids misbehave. You become caught on the horns of a dilemma. When your treat-bag-generation kids are getting treats constantly, you lose the specialness of treating them yourselves. Now, truly the only way to really treat your kids as a reward for good behavior is to not treat them to treats. And then you know you are treating them well. I think my head just exploded.
This is how bad I need a drink.
My Other Family
Holidays inevitably mean family gatherings. For parents of young children, these become mandatory. No matter how you feel about your extended family or family gatherings you will be attending. This is because now the ultimate reason for attending family gatherings is for your children to have the time of their lives with their cousins.
Little kids love their cousins. I’m not being cute or exaggerating here. Cousins are like celebrities for little kids. If little kids had a People magazine, cousins would be on the cover. Cousins are the barometers of how fun a family get-together will be. “Are the cousins going to be there? Fun!” Of course, the reason cousins seem so special could be because they are always associated with positive events. Holidays, birthdays, summer vacations. Cousins are always at the right parties. There are always presents, candy, and swimming time with cousins. That is the cousin conundrum. Cousins are like cake. Does the cake make the event fun, or is it the fun event that makes you like cake? Personally, I think it’s the cake. Doesn’t the word cake make you want cake? Ah, cake. What was I talking about?
Most of my kids haven’t even figured out that the parents of their precious cousins are actually children of siblings of Jeannie or me. “Wait, you’re Uncle Joe’s brother? What a coincidence!” To a child, there’s this intangible quality in a cousin. They are like brothers and sisters, but you don’t see them enough to get sick of them. The children of your siblings are God’s trick to keep you coming to family gatherings. “My extended family makes me crazy …, but the kids love it.”
I don’t want you to think I don’t love my extended family. I do. I just don’t want to be around them. Some of this is because I’m a loner. Some of this is because at family gatherings you are forced to face the short genetic distance between you and a clinically insane person. As a result, family gatherings always seem to coincide with brief periods of alcohol abuse on my part. I don’t drink that often, but when I get around my family— Glug, glug, glug. We’re not even arguing. “Good to see you.” Glug, glug, glug. “Yeah we had another kid.” Glug, glug, glug. It’s not just me. Everyone is drinking. Everything is an excuse to drink in my family. “Hey, it’s Fourth of July, have a beer.” “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while, have a beer.” “Hey, you’re throwing up, have a beer.” I’ve never seen my family tree, and I think this is because someone chopped it down and built a bar with it.
Family gatherings are strange. Honestly, I’m always excited for family gatherings. “This is going to be great!” Then roughly a half hour later, I’m on the phone.
“How much would it cost to change my ticket?
“To this afternoon.
“Well, I’m at the airport now.
“Can I wait on the runway?
“I need to get out of here now!”
Of course, there’s a built-in forgetter with family. You only remember when you get there. “Oh, that’s right. Everyone’s crazy! No wonder I live three thousand miles away.” Glug, glug, glug. Mankind has made amazing advancements over the centuries, but we can’t remember our family is crazy. I bet cavemen remembered. “Me know every day yellow ball go down from sky, and my extended family is bonkers.” That is why the holidays are spaced out like they are. The day after the Fourth of July, you always tell yourself, “I’m never dealing with those weirdos again.” The day before Thanksgiving, “It’s going to be great to see everyone again.” Glug, glug, glug.
Are You Done Yet?
I have five children, and I don’t even own a farm. Traditionally, big families were necessary to help with the harvest, and there was also an understanding that some children may be lost to disease. Alas, it is a different era than Little House on the Prairie. Now we have tractors, and everyone is going to make it through the winter. Big families are very rare today. When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to have a friend who came from a big family. As a matter of fact, we lived down the street from a family that had thirteen children. That seemed like a big family. Today, big families are like waterbed stores; they used to be everywhere, and now they are just weird. Admit it, whenever you see a waterbed store, you think, “Wow. That has to be a front for something illegal.” Big families are even more rare in New York City, where we live. When strangers find out I have five children, it usually makes even the toughest, most jaded New Yorker concerned. “Five kids? Are you creating your own nationality?”
Based on some reactions to hearing that I have five children, it seems as though people think that I’m ignorant of the fact that having five children is a huge task. People wil
l say instructively, “Five kids, that’s a lot.” As if they’re educating me. Oh, really? I thought it was a small number of children. Wait, is “one” a smaller number than “five” or a larger number? I always get those two confused. Can I borrow your calculator?
Many times people say, “I don’t know how you handle five kids. I have one kid, and I can barely handle it!” Well, guess what? One kid is a lot. I could barely handle having one kid. I guess it’s kind of like that science experiment with the frog in a pot where you slowly turn the heat up on the water, degree by degree, so the frog doesn’t figure out what’s happening until he’s boiling and it’s too late. Well, I am that frog. I didn’t suddenly become the father of five children. That would be really overwhelming. Not that I’m not overwhelmed. At this point, the feeling of being overwhelmed overwhelms me. Thankfully, the pregnancies and babies came one by one, each with their unique hurdles and victories. But the most entertaining gauge of our growing family was the mounting scale of reactions from friends and family.
We found out Jeannie was pregnant with Marre five weeks after we returned from our honeymoon. Yes, Jeannie is that fertile, or I’m that good at making babies. Or both. The point is, everyone was thrilled. There was a baby shower. There was endless advice from friends who already had a kid. “Say good-bye to your sex life.” (This always seems like a strange thing to say to anyone at any time.) Well, we didn’t say good-bye to it at all. In fact, ten months later, Jeannie got pregnant with our first son, Jack. Again, everyone was thrilled. There wasn’t a baby shower this time, but there was more advice from friends with two kids on how to deal. “You are really in for it now!” After two kids, a boy and a girl, you start hearing things like, “Well, now you’ve got one of each! Perfect!” To me the message was clear: “You guys should stop.”
