It was Christmastime, and the little chocolate shop had been making holiday candies for a while now. Yet its display cases were only partly stocked, with empty shelves outnumbering those that were carefully arranged with pretty candies.

Colored bows topped small bags of old-time treats lined atop the counter, and little green Christmas trees dotted the spaces between the chocolates under the glass.

Mark Truan, the owner of Truan’s Chocolates, spoke with a couple customers who were marveling over the old-fashioned hard candy that neither woman had seen since childhood. They looked at the odd colors and varied patterns, a glimpse into another era’s visual tastes, and their faces lit up the moment their minds registered the recollection they’d triggered.

“I remember those!” one of them said excitedly.

Truan’s Chocolates, on Tireman near Schaefer, sits where the city ends, with Dearborn just across the street. Melted chocolate has been poured into molds here since after World War II, in an old factory with a narrow store in the front. “I think we’re the only chocolate company left in Detroit,” says Truan, 52.

Though the candy-making machines — which can pour out over a half-ton of chocolate per day — are right here, just in the back, most of the finished candies and chocolates get driven over to Truan’s second outlet, a retail shop in Dearborn Heights. With more traffic coming to the suburban location, the original store was being stocked almost as an afterthought.

Truan admitted that more attention goes to the other store, which has longer hours and opens on the weekend. “Their counter is so much bigger and better, and there’s more inventory,” he says.

The family business began with Truan’s father selling popcorn door to door during the Great Depression. The old man was born in 1898; he was nearly 60 when his wife gave birth to Mark, and he worked until he was 85, when he turned the company over to his son, who’d worked there since he was 13, making hard candy in the back.

The original store had a soda fountain, and sold ice cream too, though several locations later the store wasn’t much more than a long counter overshadowed by empty shelves behind it and a candy factory at the back.

“The retail is not what it used to be,” he says. “It’s basically a holiday store.” Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter bring crowds; the rest of the year draws a trickle of walk-ins. “Here it’s pretty much people who have been coming all along, but in Dearborn Heights you get new and the old customers” Nowadays, most business is for Hallmark stores and supermarkets, corporate gifts and things like that.

He boasts of having the largest collection of chocolate molds in the Midwest, 300 at last count, many of them archaic tin molds that date back deep into the last century. Popular shapes include not only Santas, hearts and bunnies, but also raccoons, elephants, pigs, bulldogs, even rabbits on motorcycles, “cutesy stuff” as he calls it.

He keeps the store in the city open still, partly because the huge equipment is too burdensome to move, but also because sentimentality holds him here, where his father began years ago, back when so many people cleared the candy from the shelves, and the Detroit store was the only one there was.

Truan’s Chocolates is located at 13716 Tireman. Hours are 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, call 313-589-3400.