Halloween in March!

This story is quite strange so it MUST be shared as a blog entry, so here it goes. Monday afternoon, we walked into our organization’s “work station” to check our mailbox. Sitting on the floor were a bunch of packages that had arrived earlier in the day and so, as usual, we eagerly scanned the names. Nope…nope…nope…nope…oh wait, this one is not very clear, but I recognize that return address to be my parents. I looked at the mangled customs form and read off the declared contents of the box – kitchen supplies (bowls and plates), snacks, a belt, etc. Wait a second, those were the same contents of the last box that my parents sent during Christmastime. I looked at the date of the customs form and immediately guessed what had happened. Let me back track to give you the history.

On December 4, my parents put together and sent a special Christmas package. About 2 weeks later, that package was “returned to sender” because it lacked the necessary customs form. My parents, confident that they had attached the correct form only to have it torn off in the mail, took the package back to the post office who resent it without further charges. That package arrived in late-January. Now, in late March, three and a half months after the original package was sent, we received a package with the missing December 4^th customs form that had been ripped off. When we asked my parents about this second package, they knew nothing about it. It turns out that this package-less customs form somehow found a customs form-less package and the two were wed.

Knowing that there was no way to find the rightful owners (there were no markings on the box itself), we took great joy in opening what HAD BEEN someone else’s mail (and now was ours). So that evening, we slit the multiple layers of packing tape and immediately caught glimpses of some of our favorite candies – Butterfingers, Baby Ruths, Twizzlers, M&Ms. I started to dig down, and down and down only to discover that the whole box was filled solid with candy. No notes, no personal items, no nothing except somewhere around 30 different kinds of fun size candy, showing remnants of a Halloween long gone (which was confirmed by the occasional skeleton or ghost wrappers on chocolate pieces and a personal favorite, “toenail fungus”, aka banana Runts). For a few seconds, our hearts were deeply troubled knowing that some kid somewhere probably spent his Halloween candy-less due to this mistake, but that didn’t last long. So, like children on Halloween night, we all (our housemates included) relived the childhood memories of stomach aches after eating too many sweets. So the big question is, how old is this candy? Well, we’re hoping they are about six months old having come from Halloween 2009, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of it having sat in the corner of a post office building for much longer than that.