Deck the HALLS (tm)

I have the beginnings of a sore throat (boo! Hiss!) so I started poppin’ my HALLS brand throat lozenges today at work. While the first one was slowly dissolving in my mouth, the rush of menthol hit my sinuses and I found my inside-my-head voice sighing “aaah, Christmas.”

What?

Yes, you heard it. Halls cough drops remind me of Christmas. It all goes back to one year when my mom… er, Santa… included a pack of cherry-flavored Halls cough drops with the rest of our stocking stuffers. (My great-grandma had knitted all of us these ridiculously huge stockings and Santa had to resort to putting things like pencils, erasers, sticks of gum, pocket-sized Kleenex packs, Post-It notes, and… cough drops in them just to fill up the space.) Anyway, it was also the year that my sister and I both got our beloved Cabbage Patch Kids bed tents (I even found an old photo of us putting them up!)

The rectangular sticks of 9 square-shaped cough drops. Don’t you all remember them?
I swear those things tasted like candy when I was a kid. So, that night, I hid my pack of cherry Halls in the secret pocket of my Cabbage Patch Kids tent and ate one.
And then another.
And another.
Until I found myself eating the whole pack that night.

Mmmm... candyyyyyy.
In the years that followed, I would be mocked for my love of cherry-flavored cough drops.
But I have found some redemption in that, after searching on the web for a photo of HALLS cough drops, I should find them on a website called www.candyfavorites.com

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a soothed throat!