Yesterday, I was helping Mom put up the Christmas tree, including our eclectic collection of ornaments collected over the years. One of them, that I’ve had since I was an infant (so nearly 40 years) was made from a package of Lifesavers, that had yarn tied through the center holes in such a way that it made a sort of doll. For all these decades that we’ve had this ornament, it had never caused any problems. This year, though, one of the Lifesavers got gooey and ran, gluing that ornament to two others in the box, and leaving a big blob of sticky candy.
We kept the ornaments this past year in the same place we’ve always kept them. This summer wasn’t the hottest summer we’d ever had, nor do I think it was the most humid (it’s always fairly humid here; my mom lives less than a mile from Lake Erie). If it was just age that caused this, you’d think that it’d either happen a lot quicker than 38 years, or develop gradually from year to year instead of going from nothing to full-melted blob in a single year.
I know you know that, I’m not being snide. something exposed that particular piece to higher than usual moisture. we can only speculate on where it came from.
Two bad you didn’t have your detector up and running.
The not so smart assed answer. Perhaps there is a threshold kind of thing involving the solid surgar. Solid, solid, still mostly solid, still BARELY solid…then NOT solid. Also, in that proccess the more moisture it absorbs, the better it gets AT absorbing more…a runaway process of sorts.
And now that I think about it. I have seen the same thing you have. But not with quite on the 40 year time frame.
Funny. I had one of these, and had it for years, until I had a two-year-old who somehow deciphered that it was candy and ATE it.
The very odd thing was that at the time I had lots of fake candy-looking decorations, mostly colored cellphane over styrofoam, including a garland. Mysteriously, those kept getting unwrapped and gnawed on. Obviously he was hoping for more candy. Either he was very fast or his parents were very neglectful. I…am gonna say he was fast.
Some years later he made me another Life Saver xmas tree ornament to replace this, and possibly in the hopes that I would stop telling this story.
It could just be moisture arising from some tiny detail of storage that is different this time vs every previous year - placing it in a bag (or not in a bag), for example - could expose it to higher or more prolonged humidity, sufficient to start deliquescence.
Question for the scientists reading this: is deliquescence a ‘cascade’ phenomenon to any extent (that is, a little bit of moisture making the substance significantly more prone to absorbing further moisture?
I guess it could also be the action of moulds or other micro organisms - preservatives in the product may have broken down sufficiently to allow colonisation, or it could even be that spores of some specific species only just made it to the candy for the first time recently.
Perhaps the surface was damaged and that exposed the insides … that absorbed water out of the atmosphere.
Its also possible an insect did something that triggers the water absorbing…
enzymes are also catalysts in that the one enzyme molecules can do its work on infinite number of target molecules… So saliva or insect product that hit the lifesafer might then slowly convert molecules in the lifesaver… the product of the enzymes work might then be more hydrophilic than the unaffected molecule…
Yes, obviously water happened. The question might perhaps be better phrased as what didn’t happen for the other years that it was in storage.
It’s possible that it was due to some biological agent, insects or microorganisms or whatever. And come to think of it, it’s also possible that the real change was not in the candy, but in the wrapper: Perhaps it’s been gooey for some time now, and it’s only now that the wrapper failed sufficiently to notice it.
And I kind of get a kick out of learning that at least two other Dopers had the same ornament. Ancestry in western PA, by any chance?