This is a winning combination in my house from way back, and in all forms. Cake, cookies, bars, ice cream—and candy, of course.

This being the case, I’m not sure why it took us so long to go to Hershey when we lived in Virginia. I heard stories about the place as a kid. We had friends who went, and they talked about how the whole town smelled like cocoa, and how they had intended to eat nothing but chocolate all day but gave up and needed something more substantial for dinner. And still, I never went.

When the kid was in grade school, we finally went and made a weekend of it. At the time, I was the only one in the family who liked roller coasters, but the park had other things to offer, so we spent one day doing that and then the next day doing everything else—sitting in the class, making our own candy bars, and getting overwhelmed by the gift shop. We also took a trolley tour of the town, and this is where we learned all about Milton Hershey and Harry Burnett Reese, how Reese worked for Hershey til he struck out on his own in 1923, their friendly collaboration, and their eventual merger in 1963.

It was no surprise to any of us that Reese’s peanut butter cups became Hershey’s top seller in 1969 and the product has stayed in that spot ever since (as far as we were told). We celebrated this education by going back to the gift shop and loading ourselves down with T-shirts, towels, and one sickening indulgence of a package of two half-pound Reese’s cups.

Hershey opened a new thing in 2022 called “Stuff Your Cup,” where you buy a 1-lb chocolate shell and fill it with peanut butter and whatever add-ons you like—pretzels, marshmallows, stuff like that. I wonder if this is where the company gets its ideas for those new roll-outs, like the PB&J cups (which my son says are pretty gross and disappointing, I’m sorry to report). I’m not sure we actually need to go back for that. If we did, I suspect our 1-lb shell would be filled only with peanut butter. Why mess with perfection?