Life is Like a Box of Celebrations

The perfect metaphor for life, sort of...

According to the mother of the fictional Forrest Gump, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get.’

This phrase is partly correct, as life is more variable than the British weather, constantly changing from positive to negative, oscillating between delight and depression at a frightening rate. The expression breaks down when the word chocolate is thrown into the mix. Chocolate is incredibly variable but is no longer unpredictable.

Open a box of Celebrations and you’re confronted with a pool of chocolate bites covered in tiny bits of plastic packaging. This amalgamation of plastic wrapping also serves as an information source, letting you know exactly what type of cocoa covered bundle of E-numbers is hiding behind it. This removes the randomness of the selection procedure, making Mrs Gump’s phrase a little erroneous.

Despite this destruction of one of films greatest quotes, I really enjoy a box of Celebrations. I love the anticipation that you feel as you open the (overly excessive) packaging, ready for the chocolate to reach your mouth and tickle your taste buds. As you can tell, I’m not a food critic, otherwise I would have described the process of eating a Celebration so skilfully that you’d never need to buy a box again, just sit there and read the sentence over and over again, feeling the pleasure of chocolate eating without the calorific inconvenience. If only.

The wide variety of flavours within the Celebrations box makes your choice that much more difficult. The dilemma involving which chocolate to choose feels like the decision of your life, like deciding whether to go to university or go and get a job. It feels like a major life decision. You then eat the chocolate and then you get an insatiable craving for another, bringing the dilemma straight back. I’ve never seen someone break down and cry due to this quandary but if I offered a box of Celebration to someone with mental problems, then I might get the result.

And very quickly, the huge jumble of plastic covered lumps decays into a slightly smaller jumble of Bounties and Snickers. This is the point at which the owner of the box has to find someone who likes either of these. Finding a lover of Snickers is like looking for an invisible needle in a haystack the size of London. If not many people like Bounties or Snickers, why do the makers of Celebrations put them in? I guess that the sheer brilliance of some chocolates such as Galaxy, Milky Way and Mars must be cancelled out by the repulsiveness of nuts within the cocoa mixture, to avoid the box exploding due to excess deliciousness pressure.

My personal view is that Bounties and Snickers should be removed from the boxes of Celebrations and a more reinforced scrumptiousness overload barrier put in place. Although my opinions probably about as useful as a chocolate teapot.