A Little Sweet Relief

Not even in the snowman’s hat.

One cold day, in an office not unlike your own, we found that our snowperson-shaped candy jar was empty. So was its top half. So was its neighbor, the bevel-cut candy dish.

We froze. A Monday without emergency provisions, a workday bereft of chocolate?

Here is the hard truth we learned on that morning, and we are not proud of it: It’s not like we need chocolate for a sugar rush. It’s not that we are chocoholics.

It’s simply that we, the nose-to-the-hard-drive, overtaxed Americans, feel entitled to it--that means, of course, that workplace candy does not count in our ferocious tally of fat/calorie consumption.

After all, the wall between work and home has tumbled; the commute, the workload, the pressure mounts. We don’t turn to the bottle in the bottom drawer anymore. No, we’re smarter these days, with Food Pyramid-esque sensibilities. We listen to the scientists: chocolate may tickle the feel-good endorphins in our brain. And, in the workplace, euphoria, real or imagined, is a friend.

Hey, if it’s good enough for the mayor of Los Angeles . . .

Well, it was a dandy day brightener for Richard Riordan, until his staff recently banned sweets and filled his candy jar with crackers and peanut butter on the side (creamy, not crunchy).

“He had his hand in the candy jar too much,” says Deputy Mayor Noelia Rodriguez. “We didn’t want a mayor with no teeth.”

The mayor, we find out, gets through the day like the rest of us and still sneaks in a sugar fix.

“He’s a little kid when it comes to candy,” Rodriguez says.

Dentists, don’t answer: Is it so bad that the mayor, or any of us, turns to sweets as the primal scream of the 2000s rather than an actual primal scream?

Psychotherapist Kelly Bliss says there’s nothing wrong with the “I’ve worked hard, and I deserve a break” feeling. What’s wrong is turning too often to the office candy jar for relief when there are healthier alternatives--taking a quick walk, for instance, or trying crunchy finger carrots. In the workplace, we tend to revert to our childlike selves, when adults gave us sweets as rewards, she says.

The candy jar doesn’t have to terrorize anyone, even dieters, says Linda Webb Carilli, a registered dietitian for Weight Watchers International. Scope out the offerings on desks within your pathways and zero in on a favorite as a once-a-day treat, she says.

“Become the master of the candy jars,” Carilli says. “Decide what you want and have that. . . . The worst thing is to tell yourself you can’t have it.”

Others say it’s like a taste of home at work.

“We really do become friends and family in the workplace,” says Dana Hammontree, a Knott’s Berry Farm official. Hammontree has a Snoopy doghouse candy dish on her desk, filled with bone-shaped treats. “It’s very hospitable to have something like the comfort of home right on your desk that you can share with everyone that passes by.”

Frank Sheftel, owner of the Candy Factory in North Hollywood, is a boss with elan, the type we want to see scurry up the management ranks across America. His hands are in chocolate all day, but he still keeps a candy jar on his desk. One with two M&Ms; figures holding a big dish, no less.

He sees a dip in the candy dish as a ritual from the old country, a way to connect with a human in our high-speed modem age.

“It’s something fun,” Sheftel says. “It gives you a chance, instead of breaking bread, to break bonbons with someone.”

It’s a ritual that takes you back to kindergarten, when you could count on a midmorning and midafternoon break, notes Gwen Cole, a senior administrative secretary.

“It sort of brings out the kid in everybody,” says Cole, keeper of the candy dish for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

But it’s better as an adult, with no one to rope in your indulgence. Gives you a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” moment.

At least until the day the music dies (may your candy dish and your children’s candy dish never face such emptiness).

“They notice it,” says Cris Morgan, a supervisor in the state attorney general’s office. “They go, ‘Whoa, what happened to the candy dish?’ ”

We like to think that President Reagan used to say the same thing in the Jelly Belly droughts at the White House.

We say the same thing--except not as sweetly.