North Carolina’s Favorite Halloween Candy

It's Halloween week! Many of us are thinking about the candy that we will eat after the kids bring home their bags from trick-or-treating, and somehow. The best candy seems to find its way to the parents' mouths and stomachs, adding a little weight each year.

When Halloween comes around every year, my husband and I purchase candy. that we don’t care for to hand out to kids so that we don’t end up indulging so much in our candy that we don’t have enough to give the trick-or-treaters.

And, of course, there are kids who come with bags of candy and want to eat as much as they can right after trick-or-treating, and in the days following the holiday take the candy to their school lunch boxes and indulge themselves and their friends with the various kinds of fun and treats they got going house to house.

The history of trick-or-treating traces back to Scotland and Ireland, where the tradition of "guiding," going house to house at Halloween, and putting on a small performance to be rewarded with food or treats, goes back at least as far as the 16th century, as does the tradition of people wearing costumes at Halloween. There are many accounts from 19th-century Scotland and Ireland of people going house to house in costume at Halloween, reciting verses in exchange for food, and sometimes warning of misfortune if they were not welcomed.

The interjection "trick or treat!" was then first recorded in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1917. While going house to house in costume has long been popular among the Scots and Irish, it is only in the 2000s that saying "trick or treat" has become common in Scotland and Ireland. Prior to this, children in Ireland would commonly say "help the Halloween party" at the doors of homeowners.

What’s interesting about the kind of candy that you give out is each state in the U.S has favorites, and each state has a different favorite candy. We did a bit of a deep dive and referenced BetCarolina.com to see what the favorite candies were in North Carolina on Halloween.

The number three top favorite candy in North Carolina is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They were created on November 15, 1928, by H. B. Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for Milton S. Hershey.

The second top favorite candy in North Carolina is M&M’s. The candy originated in the United States in 1941, and M&M's have been sold in over 100 countries since 2003.

The number one top favorite candy in North Carolina is Snickers. Snickers was introduced by Mars in 1930 and named after the Mars family's favorite horse.