So Thanksgiving is over and even though the turkey leftovers aren't even finished, we've now begun a 28-day binge
of holiday Christmas music and lights and other crap. Frankly, a weekend of Christmas would be plenty for me -- but enough
has already been written about the over-hype and deluge of those aspects of Christmas.
I want to focus on other food-related parts of this jolly season.
Popcorn Tins:
I like popcorn but it is travesty to see
massive amounts of it going stale in tins, with three non-compatible flavors separated only by the
barest of cardboard dividers. I've never seen an empty popcorn tin, all the popcorn eaten. I'm not sure it's ever been done. Last year my household
ended up with three popcorn tins given to us by so-called "friends." We threw out two of them without even opening them.
No matter how much you
sugar-coat it (and the caramel is very sugary), giving popcorn tins
to someone is still just giving them popcorn for Christmas. You might
as well microwave a bag of it and wrap a ribbon around it. Might I suggest giving a smaller, more reasonable tin of Danish cookies which, unlike popcorn, actually go well with Christmas-timey things like fireplaces and tea?
Gingerbread Men:
Let's face facts here. If ginger cookies were really, really good, we'd eat them year-round like we do chocolate chip cookies and sugar cookies.
Every year, it seems they're practically stuffed down our throats. At least that's the way it is in many households when a festive person makes too many of them and all of a sudden, family and friends are being given gingerbread cookies. How about making chocolate chip or plain sugar cookies in the gingerbread molds?
Christmas Plum Pudding:
Not having been raised during Victorian times or in Great Britain, I've only eaten plum pudding once. And I was not impressed. It wasn't covered in brandy and lit on fire; it tasted a lot more like raisins than plums and raisins and I do not get along.
Depending on the recipe, plum pudding is made from plums and cherries and nuts and blackberries and blueberries, which basically just makes it a more antique version of fruit cake. Speaking of which...
Fruit Cake:
I have little to add to what every two-bit comedian has already said. Fruitcake manages to take the wonderfulness that is cake and fruit and turn it into a jellied monstrosity that tastes nothing like fruit or cake but instead feels like a silicone puree.
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