Peeps AND PEZ!

[gerisullivan]

On the Travel Channel, right now. Factory tours. I'm so there!

With a peep of thanks to damasquine for the Peeps Easter basket she gave me the last time we saw each other. Way cute!

Sorry, the Peeps part just ended...I stopped writing to watch it. Easter trivia I didn't know before: Peeps now outsell jelly beans for the holiday. I can't decide if it's sacrilege or cause for celebration.

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Why were jelly beans ever ahead? Jelly beans are nice, but they're not really eastery, are they? Am I missing some context? It sounds equivalent to saying "Easter eggs now outsell Mars bars over the Easter period".

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Jelly beans have been thecore ingredient of American Easter baskets my entire life. One always ate jelly beans at Easter, while only a few people I knew ate them any other time of the year. Jelly Belly has changed that in the last couple of decades, thanks to them having figured out how to make them taste good.

Here's a bit of jelly bean history:

Jelly beans quickly earned a place amongst the many glass jars of "penny candy" in general stores where they were sold by weight and taken home in paper bags.  It wasn't until the 1930's, however, that jelly beans became a part of Easter traditions.  Over 13.5 billion jellybeans were enjoyed at Eastertime in 1996.  If they were lined up end-to-end, they would circle the earth nearly 3 times.

And Candy Favorites has this to say about the Easter connection:

The peak season for Jelly Beans is Easter and it wasn’t until the 1930’s that they became part of the festive tradition.

As the egg shape represents fertility and birth, the jelly bean serves as a perfect holiday metaphor. The fictional and beloved Easter Bunny is believed to deliver eggs as a sign of the coming of spring and spiritual rebirth.

Jelly beans were always the most boring part of the Easter basket, the bits left over after you'd devoured all of the yummy chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs, Peeps, malted milk speckled hen's eggs, cream eggs...and the chocolate bunny, of course.

The chocolate-covered marshmallow things were half-eggs actually, and their yumminess doesn't seem to have lasted into my adulthood. They came in an egg carton, which I always thought was quite clever, and the aged texture of the marshmallow was a large part of the appeal. But the coating was more wax than chocolate, I think. Hollow chocolate bunnies had the same problem, without even the saving grace of the stale marshmallow. I always liked to look at the crystallized sugar eggs with the diorama inside, but they never tasted good.