Archive for December 7, 2017
Red + Green = Christmas, and 62 Other M&M Color Combinations
‘Tis the holiday season, so every grocery store, pharmacy, and convenience store is now stocking the M&M® Christmas Blend, a joyful combination of red and green button-shaped chocolate candies. It’s unclear whether this mixture actually helps to imbue the holiday spirit, but the consumption of these tasty morsels will make you look just a little more like St. Nick.
As far as I’m concerned, the Christmas Blend — not to be confused with Holiday Mint, which uses a (disgusting) mint chocolate filling — is one of just a few acceptable color combinations. Why? Because it uses colors that can only be found in the original Plain M&M packs, which contain red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and brown.
The original packs didn’t contain white M&M’s — sorry, Freedom Blend (Fourth of July). The original packs didn’t contain pastel colors — hop on by, Easter Blend. And nowhere on God’s green Earth will it ever be acceptable to use white chocolate inside those delectable candy shells — hit the road, Carrot Cake M&M’s. (Yuck.)
As you can tell, I’m a purist, and I have fairly strong opinions about this.
To my knowledge, there are only two other blends produced by Mars, Inc., that satisfy my acceptability criteria:
- Harvest Blend: red, yellow, brown
- Birthday Cake: red, yellow, blue
So, where am I going with all this? Glad you asked.
The Christmas, Harvest, and Birthday Cake blends represent just three of the 63 possible color combinations that can be made from the original six colors. That leaves 60 combinations that are just begging for names.
(A little history. As you may know, I have a quirk. I eat M&M’s in pairs of the same color, so I can place one on each side of my mouth and feel “balanced.” But it’s atypical for a pack to contain an even number of every color. When I near the end, I’m often left with one to six unmatched M&M’s. And I’ve always thought that these various color combinations deserved a name.)
What would you call a combination of red, yellow, and green? Obviously, STOPLIGHT.
What might you call a combination of red, yellow, and blue? Based on the Man of Steel’s outfit, I like SUPERMAN. But Mars, Inc., has already applied the moniker BIRTHDAY CAKE.
What would you call a collection of just green M&M’s? I don’t know — QADDAFI, maybe? (Sorry, dated reference.)
What would you call a combination of orange, green, and brown? I have no idea.
And that’s where you come in.
Below is a Google poll where you can enter a color combination and suggest a name. In early January, for any color combinations that have more than one suggestion, we’ll vote on it. That’s right — crowdsourcing, baby!
But before you scroll and start clicking, let me lay out some ground rules:
- Keep it clean, please, no worse than PG-13.
- No sports teams! Why? Because the Pittsburgh Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins are black and gold… and although yellow is close to gold, there are no black M&M’s in the Plain M&M’s pack, so that combination is not possible. If M&M’s can’t be used to represent my team, then they can’t be used to represent any team. Sorry — my game, my rules. Not to mention, nearly every color combination corresponds to at least one sports team, so it also demonstrates a lack of creativity. Unless, of course, you pick the colors of a team from the Swedish Bandyliiga, but let’s be honest — were you really going to do that?
Some time ago, I tried to craft names for all the combinations on my own, but I failed miserably. You can see how far I got on this Google sheet. So you can tell that I really, really need your help.
Have at it, y’all!
If you can’t see the form below, click this link:
https://goo.gl/forms/jiCEClAMSDTJtHGZ2
Don’t want to goof around with a Google form? Fine. Place your thoughts in the comments.
