The least desirable candy to get on Halloween, ranked

If you were a kid in the last 30 years, you have to remember the bummer treats in your plastic jack-o’-lantern—the ones you separated from the mini-Hershey’s bars and Sour Patch Kids, and offered to your younger sibling because you had not yet developed a strong sense of what was right and wrong. Well, now you’re an adult, and if you’re voluntarily giving children the following Halloween treats, you, my friend, have a heart of darkness. OK, that might be a little harsh. In fact, props for even prepping for trick-or-treaters. But, try to avoid dishing out these items if you want to stay ‘cool’ with the kids.

13. Smarties: Want some vitamin-tasting things with no nutritional value? No, you don’t because you’re a person.

12. Candy Apples: These guys were usually too hard to bite into—even after your parents dissected them to check for razor blades.

11.Wax Lips: Were these even edible? Nobody would give us a straight answer.

10. Double Bubble: Points for being gum, but minus-points for being tooth-shatteringly hard.

9. Pumpkin candies: The only thing worse than a plastic baggy of candy corn, was a handful (hand to candy contact = a problem) of these pumpkin-shaped waxy thingamabobs.

8. Sugar Daddies: Memo to candy-makers: we have evolved past taffy.

7. Anything in this wax paper: Remember that whole taffy thing we talked about?

6. Strawberry Suckers: These candies were hard on the outside and weirdly jelly-like on the inside. And that’s if you got a batch made after the 1950s. If your suckers were older than that (and most were) that inner-jelly was disturbingly chewy.

5. Bit O Honey: Oh come ON.

4. Mary Janes: Even worse. This candy tastes like it was invented by a man who wore a non-ironic monocle and collected abacuses as a hobby.

3. Restaurant mints: So not candy.

2. Raisins: Ah, nature’s candy. Love you, nature, but Halloween just isn’t your day.

1. Pennies: We know it’s not candy, but SOME people don’t. If there’s anything that says ‘I didn’t prepare for Halloween trick-or-treaters,’ it’s a fistful of smelly pennies from the bottom of a purse. Points for the last-minute gesture, but maybe just don’t answer the door.

(Image via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via, via)