I would think the 3 dozen candles isn't such a bad thing.
From someone who has a few to many candles myself - and lived in Alaska as a kid where canceled school for power outages was way more common than canceled school for snow days (never happened in fact):
It's more than needed in an emergency - just need a handful easily accessible. And candles (good, big ones not the taper ones) burn much longer than you think.
