Kristina L. Martin

"Here," she gestured. "Try this," and I opened my mouth. The chocolate landed on my tongue and began to melt. It was unlike anything I'd ever tasted. It reminded me of the carob chips foisted upon me during my mother's hippy stage. It was also a bit like the Hershey's Special Dark miniatures I always traded for my sister's Mr. Goodbars at Halloween. But this chocolate was definitely a distant cousin to the more familiar wrapped in silver or covering a mixture of peanuts, caramel, and nougat. I was in heaven.

"What is it?" I mumbled around the square melting on my tongue.

"That is what Cadbury's calls a bittersweet. I think it tastes just like Christmas."

And with that, my friend Tan's grandmother wrestled off the tin's lid and brandished another chocolate like it was pirate's treasure. "Ah, this one's a caramel. Go on, try it. It's gorgeous."

Cadbury's? The makers of those heinous chocolate eggs filled with sugary goo and made to mimic real chicken eggs? That Cadbury's? I was incredulous. And the tin can? The only thing I'd ever seen sold in a tin can that size was the popcorn trifecta sold by the Boy Scouts. Never had I witnessed such an assortment of chocolate in one place. This was certainly no drug store Whitman's Sampler, the likes of which my mother had been tucking into my Christmas stocking for as long as I could remember. Christmas always included many variations of chocolate in my childhood home, but I had never celebrated Christmas with a taste quite like this.