Halloween Meltdown ’16: More Junk Food

When you walk into my local Marunaka (a big grocery chain), there’s a display of Halloween junk food right at the front. So naturally every time I go there I cave and buy at least one Halloween-branded thing. This time the main event was this bag of cookies with the hilarious brand name “Country Ma’am,” which in Japanese is pronounced “kahn-toe-ree ma-mu.” (That’s not a proper romaji rendering, for all you language nerds, but an accurate phonetic one.)

These are another ordinary thing made super great by the application of tacky Halloween graphics, and I couldn’t be happier. The best part is, for mass-produced garbage snacks, these cookies are really good. They’re just normal chocolate chip cookies (with both regular and chocolate dough), but they’re slightly chewy in the middle and the chocolate chips melt in your mouth. Not sure the tiny silver dollar-sized cookies need to be individually wrapped, but whatever, they scratch that chocolate chip itch.

Halloween Meltdown ’16: Yankee Candles’ “Buries Hilton”

Halloween is a time when we delight in shattering our own smug little assumptions about the world. Think you’re safe in that beautiful completely refurbed New England colonial with the scarecrow and the leaf garland and the smells of hot cider and pumpkin spice permanently embedded in its gorgeous red clapboard siding as if it were bestowed upon the earth by the Gods of Autumn themselves? Well Mike Myers and Jason Voorhees and, like, Boris Karloff are here and they freaking hate seasonal coffee flavorings, so watch out! Halloween!

In keeping with this theme of totally breaking your mind I offer you this deliciously, fabulously, impossibly American nod to our favorite season, “Buries Hilton.” Abandon all hope:

(Yankee Candle)

There is so much to unpack from this. Is it an incisive criticism of America’s tendency to glorify celebrity excess? She is a “rich ghoul” and her name is Buries. She has a (possibly dead) ornamental dog in one hand, an orange martini glass in the other, a spiderweb chemise under her Angelina Jolie leg-curtain dress, a WWE-worthy belt, and despite being a cartoonish skull-faced monster, she still actually kind of vaguely resembles Paris Hilton.

Is this a snarky commentary on superficial, consumerist American popular culture? Can it be that, coming from Yankee Candle, who will happily sell you an entire paycheck’s worth of Apple Spice tealights to use in it?

These are the wrong questions to ask because this is a punny rip on Paris Hilton in Halloween colors and you can put pumpkin spice candles in it and there’s no reason for any of you not to buy two of these, one for yourselves and one to give to anyone who doesn’t believe that such a thing exists.