Are these new this year? Holy crap, they’re good. I’ve eaten like 17 of these since last night.

I’m digging through my kids’ Halloween candy while watching the early games. The occasion has led to me to rate the 4pm games according the types of candy I find…

Minnesota at Green Bay – This game is the good candy that’s always gone within a day and a half of Halloween. Like Reece’s Cups or fun-size Snickers bars. Brett Favre, who actually throws fewer interceptions than you think, makes his return to Lambeau today. Didja see Fuzzy Thurston bad-mouth Favre on ESPN Sunday Countdown this morning? Until you’ve had an old man with an electronic voice box curse your very name, you really haven’t lived.

Oakland at San Diego – Sure the Raiders suck, but I like them. So this game is an acquired taste that others might not necessarily enjoy, like Laffy Taffy or mini Heath bars. ESPN Outside the Lines wants to dispel the notion that Raiders coach Tom Cable only likes beating men half his size– apparently he also enjoys beating women half his size too.

Sadly, none of my trick-or-treaters looked like this.

Jacksonville at Tennessee – Somebody gave my kid a bag of pretzels. Seriously, a goddam bag of pretzels. What kind of sociopath hands out bags of pretzels to kids on Halloween? Fuck you, Mr. Neighbor Man, and fuck the people at the Utz snack company for enabling this asshole. This game features the return of Vince Young to the Titans’ starting lineup. So it’s not just a bag of pretzels, it’s a bag of pretzels with a rat turd inside.

My mom liked putting the candy in little Easter baskets with that shredded cellophane grass inside. I swear I still have some of this grass somewhere on my person today. It was impossible to get off the candy or your hands. If you spilled some on the floor, you may as well have just replaced the thing. I’m assuming Easter baskets today are now lined with FieldTurf. They should be.

I am not a terribly religious person. I knew all about the Easter bunny and candy WAY before someone actually told me that Easter was about Jesus pulling a Meredith Grey and then ascending to the Heavens, wowing audiences all across Judea. As such, my priorities are completely twisted. What’s this Jesus guy doing fucking with the Easter Bunny’s holiday, I’d often think. The Easter Bunny got Easter first, I thought. But this wasn’t actually true. It’s not unlike people forgetting that Go Bots actually came out BEFORE Transformers did. The problem was that Go Bots sucked, so no one gave a shit if they were the pioneers in car-to-robot shape-shifters. Such as it is with Jesus, who gets pushed aside in favor of the Easter Bunny and his pastel-colored Halloween. People can be ruthless like that.

In general, I have a very strong policy against food that is made to look like other food. I think gummi hamburgers are fucking disgusting. I do not like it when someone sculpts marzipan into pigs or hot dogs, or some other shit like that. Circus peanuts terrify me. I like my food to resemble its original incarnation. If you have to make it look like some other food to get me to eat it, that means there’s something wrong with the food in its regular form. And I don’t need that. Not at all.

The one exception to this, without fail, is the Cadbury Crème Egg. Holy fuck are Crème Eggs good. One time I made a strawberry preserve omelet out of them. Amazing. (NOTE: not actually true) Watching the above commercial when I was a kid was pretty much the same as finding Jesus. What? They made an egg OUT OF CANDY? They even gave it a candy yolk? HOLY FUCK, THAT IS A MIRACLE. I had to have one. And, to this day, that same thinking pattern occurs in my brain every Easter.

What I like to do is bite the top off the egg, nibble around the sides, and allow the unholy white egg goo to spill out the side, which I then immediately slurp up like Peter King on Tony Romo. Fucking tremendous. Want to take the whole egg in one bite? I’m cool with that. But I think the goo can get lost on the palate that way. It’s that precious filling that makes the Crème Egg so special, so I do my best to maximize it.

They make Caramel Eggs now. They also make Orange Crème Eggs. These versions are a blasphemy, an affront to worshippers of the one true Crème Egg, and I won’t stand for it. The Easter Bunny wasn’t strung up by the Romans and tortured just so I would have to tolerate the bastardization of the original Crème Egg. Therefore, I propose that all grocery stores carrying these knockoffs be branded as heretics and burned alive.

It’s the only way to get people to remember what Easter is truly all about.