Candy hearts are so appealing that you can find them depicted on fabrics, wrapping paper, and cards. I guess Hershey’s kisses show up once in a while, but candy hearts are a much more popular Valentine’s Day icon.

What’s so appealing about them? I think it’s the messages. Without messages, candy hearts would be just another heart-shaped candy that isn’t chocolate. Boring.

But what is it about the messages that makes candy hearts fun? After all, they aren’t exactly poetry. Mostly candy hearts offer a random assortment of sentimental cliches and catch-phrases, nothing particularly interesting or original.

I think what makes them fun is the very fact that you get such an assortment. You can pick through the hearts till you find just the right message to hand to a particular person. It might be a compliment: “Shining Star”, “You Are Nice”, or “Dear One”. It might be a request: “Be My Friend”, “Let’s Talk”, “Dance With Me.” It might even be a question: “Will You Marry Me?”

Alternatively, you can draw one at random and be surprised. It’s a bit like a fortune cookie.

It occurs to me that, like many other things, candy hearts lend themselves to stories. What if someone pulled a candy heart out of a jar, just for a quick mouthful of sugar, and discovered that it said something really unexpected?

 “You are being watched.”

 Or: “She’s lying.”

Or: “Look up.”

In fact, candy hearts (or something like them) do show up in stories. In Mary Poppins Comes Back by P. L. Travers, Mary takes the children to a very odd store where she asks for “an ounce of Conversations.”

Jane gets “a flat star-shaped sweet rather like a peppermint” with the words “You’re My Fancy.” Michael pulls out a shell-shaped one with “I Love You. Do You Love Me?” The twins, John and Barbara, are given “Deedle deedle dumpling” and “Shining-bright and airy”, but Mary Poppins’s sweet is shaped like a half-moon and reads, “Ten o’clock to-night.”

Naturally, Mary Poppins explains nothing, and equally naturally, strange things happen that night at ten o’clock.

The tales of Raggedy Ann also involve a candy heart, if I remember correctly. A disaster leads to Raggedy Ann being restuffed, and the woman repairing her puts in a candy heart that says “I love you.” Later, Raggedy Ann falls in some water, and she tells her friends that since the candy has melted, the “I love you” is now spread throughout her insides.*

But enough about stories. Setting aside the content of the messages for the moment, how well do candy hearts succeed at being Valentine decorations? The colors are fine and so is the shape, but I have mixed feelings about the way they are printed. I like the large ones from Brach’s because they have longer messages, but the words look like they came from a bad dot-matrix printer. On the positive side, I suspect whatever technique they are now using allows them to vary the messages more, which is all to the good. Maybe the quality of the print will improve over the coming years. The Sweetheart brand small hearts have a long way to go—they are often barely readable.

And how well do candy hearts succeed at being candy—that is, how do they taste? I bought the small Sweethearts because Sweethearts are made by the New England Confectionery Company, which makes NECCO wafers. I like NECCO wafers, and the hearts looked as though they were made of the same stuff, so I expected them to taste the same.

When I tasted the various colors, though, I wondered if they’d changed the flavors of their hearts. I don’t remember green being green-apple flavored, and the blue… did they even have blue hearts earlier? A quick check on-line shows that the flavors changed some years ago, which makes me wonder when I last bought Sweethearts. (They contain gelatin, so maybe not since my daughter went vegetarian?)

Since I don’t like the flavors very much, and certainly don’t need the extra sugar, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to skip the candy altogether and substitute colorful paper hearts or wooden hearts with messages on the reverse. (I’m sure these must exist.) But then what does your friend or sweetie do when you hand them a suitably-messaged heart? Keep it forever? Smile appreciation and then toss it in the trash? (Or back in the bowl, if it’s a wooden heart?) There’s something to be said for being able to pop the message in one’s mouth after reading it.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Till next post.

* Build-a-Bear uses a non-edible version of this trick.

Really, I should say it is filled with My Idea of Soup. Yours may be quite different. My Idea of Soup tends to be filled with chunks of vegetables, possibly also with beef but not chicken, and garnished with chopped parsley. I don’t think I ever actually garnish soup with chopped parsley—I rarely remember to add parsley at all. But in My Idea of Soup, there is fresh green parsley.

My Idea of Soup. Where did it come from? I can think of several sources.

One is my favorite jigsaw puzzle, “Cubbyhole Cottage.” I was six or seven years old when I received it—my younger brother got a 60 piece puzzle with a jet plane on it. We used to have competitions to see who could put their puzzle together faster.

I liked to imagine myself as one of the people living in this old-fashioned house. Most often, I imagined myself as the girl in the purple dress and cap—the one stirring the soup. She seemed like the most important person in the house, as she was making the meal. The others were tidying, or setting the table, or watering the flowers, or just playing. Not nearly as important. Also, I liked the girl’s ruffle-edged apron.

Another source for My Idea of Soup is a story by Margaret Wise Brown, “Mister Dog”, in a book of bedtime stories from long ago. The illustrations are by Garth Williams, one of my favorite illustrators.

The story is about Crispin’s Crispian, a dog who belongs to himself. One day, after various adventures,  he meets a boy who belongs to himself and invites the boy to come live with him. They stop by the butcher shop on the way home, and the dog buys a bone while the boy gets a lamb chop and “a bright green vegetable.” The dog makes soup and gives some to the boy, who contributes some of his bright green vegetable to the soup.

And now you know why My Idea of Soup is garnished with fresh parsley.

Finally, there is the old story of Stone Soup. There’s something appealing about all those people contributing a bit of this or that to the pot, and ending up with a tasty, nourishing soup “from a stone!” I love that idea.

Alas, in practice I’ve found that adding random vegetables to my soup tends to work about as well as mixing a lot of random paints together. The result is muddy and not particularly appealing. Even when I try to stick close to basics, the results are variable. However, the following ingredients generally work for a “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” soup (except that as I said earlier, I tend to forget the parsley.)

So I guess that’s what I should do, to fulfill My Idea of Soup. I should keep records the next time I make some vegetable (and beef) soup. Maybe I’ll even make some tonight. After all, it’s freezing outside and my husband has a cold.

Coziness and caring. Isn’t that what soup is all about?