Parents eagerly await their camp’s visiting day.  From the moment the kids are shipped off, the parents are already beginning the scavenger hunt for candy and comic books and candy and baseball cards and candy and batteries and oh yeah, candy.  The big day arrives, shopping bags full of snacks and candies are packed into the car and driven three hours upstate.  At Camp X for example, five hundred campers are greeted by around one thousand parents who are delivering roughly two thousand bags filled with approximately 40,000 different snacks and candies. That’s just Camp X.  What about the other 2,500 camps or so nationwide?  Are you getting the idea? Do you have your calculator out?

The parents spend the day, kisses and hugs all around and then they leave. Dinner is a joke that night because the belly ache parties are scheduled.  The kids rush back to their bunks and go to town on their food.  Twix are traded for Kit Kats and Twizzlers fly across the room in exchange for Twinkies.  It’s raining Skittles and M&M’s and Snickers and Milky Ways and Three Musketeers.  Kids are stepping on gummy bears and Oreo’s and Pop Tarts and Chips Ahoy and pretzels and potato chips.  The scene is nothing short of an explosion at the Willy Wonka factory. It is an all-you-can-eat buffet of junk food.  But it is over that night and whatever is not consumed is trashed and carted away.  Far away to the garbage cages behind the kitchen where the raccoons cannot get to.

It is one day, one night, but visiting day is one heck of a boost to the stocks of companies like Hershey’s and Frito-Lays and M&M/Mars.  Camp Visiting Day is a nationally recognized holiday affectionately referred to as Candy Day.