In all my years of questing, in all my years of enjoying sweets, there have been few that managed to instill a sense of self-loathing in my person quite like this monstrously large lollipop.
![Posted Image]()
Literally the band All-Day Sucker
I should back up, since this requires an explanation. This entire ordeal is my own fault. I am an adult, a fairly young adult still getting used to being able to spend money on himself. For those whose memories of that moment are distant, there's a strange transition in that time where a person still feels those primal urges as their eyes roll across displays of candy in a store. There are novelty candies designed to appeal to adults, to be sure, but nothing is literal eye-candy for kids quite like the all-day sucker. This is a sweet based entirely on a kid's notion of candy. "You like lollipops?" it asks. "Well, I'm all the candy of twenty lollipops on the same stick! I've got all the colors, too! This is a good idea!" In fact, it is in all likelihood an innocent idea from some confectioner long ago, a confectioner who intended the best for the kids receiving this treat.
Like any young adult, my internal struggle was a decade-long war of attrition and bargaining with myself. I was the one with the job and the pay that comes with; no longer would I have to tell someone before I went out for the afternoon, no longer do I ask my parents before going online, and never must I beg and plead for some harried parent to buy a gimmicky nutrition-free treat. I was raised well, however, and good parents leave a psychic thumbprint of good advice- a Jiminy Cricket style conscience, the same ideal a religious man appeals to when asking himself "What Would Jesus Do". What my mother would ask first is whether or not I actually need this candy. Money is a limited resource, which is why money works as a method of trade at all; one must leave room to pay for all the cars and gasoline, the clothing and furniture, the concrete meals and abstract taxes, the occasional vacation to clear one's head. A giant lollipop is so small on that hierarchy of needs that it resembles a pinhead balanced on the tip of that pyramid design so popular in graphs in the mid 20th century, yet that siren's call is inexorable nonetheless. My mother would then ask why I wanted this candy, a sticky question indeed. There are plenty of ADULTS who don't consciously know why they do the things they do, and with supermarket impulse buys, there isn't often much of a solid reason. "Because I want it," the kid would explain. Why do they want it? "Because it's my favorite." The candy they only found out about ten seconds ago is their favorite, of course, because it is bright and shining and colorful. If a person wants to get themselves a lollipop heavy and dense enough to crack walnuts, they must stop kidding themselves and admit the real reason they bought this product.
In my case, I bought this lollipop because I wanted to swing it around while pretending to be a Viking.
![Posted Image]()
From Someinterestingfacts.net, unattributed
This new prop gave me days of fun! Without even unwrapping the damn thing, I spent many nights acting as Grabnok the Destroyer, the hero who once wielded the infamous Axe of Many Colours. I could blame those hours of pretend violence on movies or video games or evening news, or even the Vikings mini-series in specific, but there's a certain charm to the all-day sucker's design that makes it perfect for cruel imagination. The stick this sweet is built around is a stiff, light pine, lathed and polished until the roughness of its grain is faded away. Give it a swing and it bends only slightly, lacking that sense of momentum until the very end of its trip. Candy this dense feels like a solid wall of pottery when one raps their knuckles on it, a blend of toughness and fragility difficult to find in other materials. It may not be a real weapon, but the all-day sucker feels as if it would destroy any orc or skeleton it came in contact with.
Sadly, candy must always eventually be eaten. Lollipops such as these come shrink-wrapped in an impossibly close skin of plastic wrap, the kind that a small child would have to ask their parents to cut off with the pointy-tipped scissors they are not allowed to touch quite yet. Those with strong enough hands can dig a fingernail into the spot where this wrap was fused together, that crusty jagged spine placed where more hand-holding packaging designers would put their patronizing "tear here" dotted line. Amusingly enough, the shrink wrap used to have the nutrition label printed on it, until it… shrank. Between text which was bent and warped, rendered psychedelic as the rainbow swirls underneath, I could decipher that the official serving size was 1/20th of the lollipop. That is not an exaggeration, that is the largest portion of this treat your doctor suggests you eat per day.
Any kid could tell you that the serving size is a joke, and their parents would probably know that the serving size is made entirely of weasel words. To list the entire lollipop as a serving would be like calling an entire bag of sugar a serving, for this candy is purposely a bag of sugar melted down and moulded into a disc. And yet a lollipop is a Boolean consumable; it is either on or off, here or gone, eaten or un-eaten. This is not the same case as other unhealthy treats like a bag of chips or a box of snack cakes, where a bag can be clipped closed or a box safely shelved, where chips are individual pieces and a snack cake comes with a wrapper in the box, a giant lollipop is not so easily portioned. Without an array of tools one would find in a physics lab or a sculptor's workshop, no small child will be able to chip off exactly 1/20th of a solid brick of once-molten sugar for responsible enjoyment. Neither would they want to; to a child, a lollipop said to have the mass of twenty lollipops is a dare to eat twenty lollipops in a row, not a warning to stretch one piece of candy out for twenty meals. This isn't even the kind of candy that comes in a resealable package, unless whoever is eating it has enough patience to preserve a thin piece of plastic wrap (often the kind of person unable to have fun with giant lollipops). The warped nutrition label seems almost like a subtle gesture by the manufactures, a silent whisper of, "we know this information is useless but we still have to put it here".
![Posted Image]()
By Phantomaxes on DeviantArt. Also, be careful about typing "All-Day Sucker" into Google.
I enjoyed the all-day sucker for the first ten minutes. The colorful hard candy has a generally pleasant yet mysterious taste one might call "tutti frutti" or "wild berry" if forced to give it a name. There is no solid identity one could give to the flavor, no sour citrus tang, no medicine-style cherry or grape. It is the same substance as a candy cane, writ large and coiled into a massive swirl, a scepter of authority. "Finish me," it promises, "and you will be the king of candy". So I lick it, and lick it some more, and begin to bite large chunks off once my tongue is exhausted. A person who claims they have never bit into a hard candy they were supposed to suck on slowly is a liar and a spinner of tall-tales.
It was then that I began to run into one of the many curses of advancing age; even if I have the right to buy indefinitely large amounts of candy, I will always hit a point where I am unwilling to continue eating it. This is not being UNABLE to continue, I have yet to lose that much innocence. This stubborn mode of thought is a holdover from younger versions of myself; any kid out there, when faced with all the wonderful sugar in the world, insists on eating it all at once. That I cannot eat it all at once is one part responsibility, one part appreciating how lucky I am to be born in a country where overeating is possible, and one part hard limits on the size of my stomach. There is a certain wall that sane people hit when confronted with this many wonderful empty calories, a wall that is made not of stone but of lethargy and a buzzing sensation that is unnatural, clearly a warning from your own body.
My teeth know the pain too. For all the cliché dentist's warnings of cavities and decay, I try to take care of my teeth. Okay, perhaps I could actually floss instead of simply claiming I floss, but at the very least I don't let food linger in between the cracks. But this lollipop knows when you chew upon it, and like any hard candy it responds in kind; a gummy, rock-hard sheet of sugar forms in the crowns of your molars, resisting any but the most invasive of attempts at removal. My negligence and eagerness to push forward results in a comically thick coating of the stuff, like a polar ice cap injected with food coloring, warning me to stop. And yet it moves, as I continue to break chunks off and pop them in my mouth. I'm not enjoying it at that moment, I won't enjoy it until I have a good rest and some time to reflect, but I am filled with some twisted duty to continue. I'm eating just to defeat the lollipop, draining the dye off of the surface and relishing in the white bony sugar underneath. Grobnak the Destroyer will have his victory, even if he must slay twenty servings in one night.
![Posted Image]()
Hours later, I have this much of it finished. Three servings, maybe four.
The real problems came when I tried to store it. No container can properly hold the long stick, any container large enough to hold it should not be wasted on one piece of candy, and just breaking the stick off would turn a fun lollipop into a terrible piece of grandma candy with splinters on one end. And it MUST be contained, because the surface of this sweet is adhesive even when dry. A thick shellac of tacky, wonderfully gooey corn syrup shines on the outside of the candy, clinging to the shrink wrap, holding the whole thing together even when fractured. It provides a great mouth feel when eating it, but to stop eating is something this design will not tolerate. Incredible effort must be taken to stop dust and lint from gathering on top of it, because it WILL gather dust and it will NOT ever dry completely. I tried freezing it just to be sure, and two hours later it was sticky inside the freezer. This bowl is what I eventually settled on, and it requires a lever and some elbow grease to peel it off when I want another taste.
And I WILL have another taste. No matter how much I complain, no matter how much I blow it out of proportion, I love this candy and I won't give up on it for anything. Grobnak the Destroyer shall charge onto the battlefield for another skirmish, because that's how a war is won- through attrition, through wearing the enemy down until they surrender, left with nothing but a bare wooden dowel. When I look upon the rubble at the end of this conflict, I will smile and think to myself how I can finally start enjoying candy again.

Literally the band All-Day Sucker
I should back up, since this requires an explanation. This entire ordeal is my own fault. I am an adult, a fairly young adult still getting used to being able to spend money on himself. For those whose memories of that moment are distant, there's a strange transition in that time where a person still feels those primal urges as their eyes roll across displays of candy in a store. There are novelty candies designed to appeal to adults, to be sure, but nothing is literal eye-candy for kids quite like the all-day sucker. This is a sweet based entirely on a kid's notion of candy. "You like lollipops?" it asks. "Well, I'm all the candy of twenty lollipops on the same stick! I've got all the colors, too! This is a good idea!" In fact, it is in all likelihood an innocent idea from some confectioner long ago, a confectioner who intended the best for the kids receiving this treat.
Like any young adult, my internal struggle was a decade-long war of attrition and bargaining with myself. I was the one with the job and the pay that comes with; no longer would I have to tell someone before I went out for the afternoon, no longer do I ask my parents before going online, and never must I beg and plead for some harried parent to buy a gimmicky nutrition-free treat. I was raised well, however, and good parents leave a psychic thumbprint of good advice- a Jiminy Cricket style conscience, the same ideal a religious man appeals to when asking himself "What Would Jesus Do". What my mother would ask first is whether or not I actually need this candy. Money is a limited resource, which is why money works as a method of trade at all; one must leave room to pay for all the cars and gasoline, the clothing and furniture, the concrete meals and abstract taxes, the occasional vacation to clear one's head. A giant lollipop is so small on that hierarchy of needs that it resembles a pinhead balanced on the tip of that pyramid design so popular in graphs in the mid 20th century, yet that siren's call is inexorable nonetheless. My mother would then ask why I wanted this candy, a sticky question indeed. There are plenty of ADULTS who don't consciously know why they do the things they do, and with supermarket impulse buys, there isn't often much of a solid reason. "Because I want it," the kid would explain. Why do they want it? "Because it's my favorite." The candy they only found out about ten seconds ago is their favorite, of course, because it is bright and shining and colorful. If a person wants to get themselves a lollipop heavy and dense enough to crack walnuts, they must stop kidding themselves and admit the real reason they bought this product.
In my case, I bought this lollipop because I wanted to swing it around while pretending to be a Viking.

From Someinterestingfacts.net, unattributed
This new prop gave me days of fun! Without even unwrapping the damn thing, I spent many nights acting as Grabnok the Destroyer, the hero who once wielded the infamous Axe of Many Colours. I could blame those hours of pretend violence on movies or video games or evening news, or even the Vikings mini-series in specific, but there's a certain charm to the all-day sucker's design that makes it perfect for cruel imagination. The stick this sweet is built around is a stiff, light pine, lathed and polished until the roughness of its grain is faded away. Give it a swing and it bends only slightly, lacking that sense of momentum until the very end of its trip. Candy this dense feels like a solid wall of pottery when one raps their knuckles on it, a blend of toughness and fragility difficult to find in other materials. It may not be a real weapon, but the all-day sucker feels as if it would destroy any orc or skeleton it came in contact with.
Sadly, candy must always eventually be eaten. Lollipops such as these come shrink-wrapped in an impossibly close skin of plastic wrap, the kind that a small child would have to ask their parents to cut off with the pointy-tipped scissors they are not allowed to touch quite yet. Those with strong enough hands can dig a fingernail into the spot where this wrap was fused together, that crusty jagged spine placed where more hand-holding packaging designers would put their patronizing "tear here" dotted line. Amusingly enough, the shrink wrap used to have the nutrition label printed on it, until it… shrank. Between text which was bent and warped, rendered psychedelic as the rainbow swirls underneath, I could decipher that the official serving size was 1/20th of the lollipop. That is not an exaggeration, that is the largest portion of this treat your doctor suggests you eat per day.
Any kid could tell you that the serving size is a joke, and their parents would probably know that the serving size is made entirely of weasel words. To list the entire lollipop as a serving would be like calling an entire bag of sugar a serving, for this candy is purposely a bag of sugar melted down and moulded into a disc. And yet a lollipop is a Boolean consumable; it is either on or off, here or gone, eaten or un-eaten. This is not the same case as other unhealthy treats like a bag of chips or a box of snack cakes, where a bag can be clipped closed or a box safely shelved, where chips are individual pieces and a snack cake comes with a wrapper in the box, a giant lollipop is not so easily portioned. Without an array of tools one would find in a physics lab or a sculptor's workshop, no small child will be able to chip off exactly 1/20th of a solid brick of once-molten sugar for responsible enjoyment. Neither would they want to; to a child, a lollipop said to have the mass of twenty lollipops is a dare to eat twenty lollipops in a row, not a warning to stretch one piece of candy out for twenty meals. This isn't even the kind of candy that comes in a resealable package, unless whoever is eating it has enough patience to preserve a thin piece of plastic wrap (often the kind of person unable to have fun with giant lollipops). The warped nutrition label seems almost like a subtle gesture by the manufactures, a silent whisper of, "we know this information is useless but we still have to put it here".

By Phantomaxes on DeviantArt. Also, be careful about typing "All-Day Sucker" into Google.
I enjoyed the all-day sucker for the first ten minutes. The colorful hard candy has a generally pleasant yet mysterious taste one might call "tutti frutti" or "wild berry" if forced to give it a name. There is no solid identity one could give to the flavor, no sour citrus tang, no medicine-style cherry or grape. It is the same substance as a candy cane, writ large and coiled into a massive swirl, a scepter of authority. "Finish me," it promises, "and you will be the king of candy". So I lick it, and lick it some more, and begin to bite large chunks off once my tongue is exhausted. A person who claims they have never bit into a hard candy they were supposed to suck on slowly is a liar and a spinner of tall-tales.
It was then that I began to run into one of the many curses of advancing age; even if I have the right to buy indefinitely large amounts of candy, I will always hit a point where I am unwilling to continue eating it. This is not being UNABLE to continue, I have yet to lose that much innocence. This stubborn mode of thought is a holdover from younger versions of myself; any kid out there, when faced with all the wonderful sugar in the world, insists on eating it all at once. That I cannot eat it all at once is one part responsibility, one part appreciating how lucky I am to be born in a country where overeating is possible, and one part hard limits on the size of my stomach. There is a certain wall that sane people hit when confronted with this many wonderful empty calories, a wall that is made not of stone but of lethargy and a buzzing sensation that is unnatural, clearly a warning from your own body.
My teeth know the pain too. For all the cliché dentist's warnings of cavities and decay, I try to take care of my teeth. Okay, perhaps I could actually floss instead of simply claiming I floss, but at the very least I don't let food linger in between the cracks. But this lollipop knows when you chew upon it, and like any hard candy it responds in kind; a gummy, rock-hard sheet of sugar forms in the crowns of your molars, resisting any but the most invasive of attempts at removal. My negligence and eagerness to push forward results in a comically thick coating of the stuff, like a polar ice cap injected with food coloring, warning me to stop. And yet it moves, as I continue to break chunks off and pop them in my mouth. I'm not enjoying it at that moment, I won't enjoy it until I have a good rest and some time to reflect, but I am filled with some twisted duty to continue. I'm eating just to defeat the lollipop, draining the dye off of the surface and relishing in the white bony sugar underneath. Grobnak the Destroyer will have his victory, even if he must slay twenty servings in one night.

Hours later, I have this much of it finished. Three servings, maybe four.
The real problems came when I tried to store it. No container can properly hold the long stick, any container large enough to hold it should not be wasted on one piece of candy, and just breaking the stick off would turn a fun lollipop into a terrible piece of grandma candy with splinters on one end. And it MUST be contained, because the surface of this sweet is adhesive even when dry. A thick shellac of tacky, wonderfully gooey corn syrup shines on the outside of the candy, clinging to the shrink wrap, holding the whole thing together even when fractured. It provides a great mouth feel when eating it, but to stop eating is something this design will not tolerate. Incredible effort must be taken to stop dust and lint from gathering on top of it, because it WILL gather dust and it will NOT ever dry completely. I tried freezing it just to be sure, and two hours later it was sticky inside the freezer. This bowl is what I eventually settled on, and it requires a lever and some elbow grease to peel it off when I want another taste.
And I WILL have another taste. No matter how much I complain, no matter how much I blow it out of proportion, I love this candy and I won't give up on it for anything. Grobnak the Destroyer shall charge onto the battlefield for another skirmish, because that's how a war is won- through attrition, through wearing the enemy down until they surrender, left with nothing but a bare wooden dowel. When I look upon the rubble at the end of this conflict, I will smile and think to myself how I can finally start enjoying candy again.
