When I was younger, I thought the beginning of a new calendar year was a stupid thing to celebrate. It might have made sense if the new year actually coincided with some astronomical event like the winter solstice. The first day of spring, the true season of rebirth, would have been even better. Instead the […]
In Southern California, we never had White Christmases. Maybe up in the mountains we’d see a bit of snow, but down in the basin, it was typically not even all that cold. And that always sort of bother me. I remember how excited I got one Christmas when it rained. I had received a pair […]
In my day, Christmas never had anything to do with gingerbread. Gingerbread was the stuff of fairy tales and children’s poems. It was the raw material that witch’s houses were made of. It was the sugary drywall and roofing shingles that lured woebegone children away from their parents and into the stomach’s of crones. Ho, […]
As we head deeper into the holiday season, (This weekend is the annual caroling party.) I thought it was a good time to trot out some more Christmas-y foods to keep my eyes on the prize as things start to get a bit crazier. And they will get crazier. After several years of freelancing, this […]
Since I’ve been married, the Christmas season has started right after Thanksgiving. Immediately after, in fact. Our holiday party is on the first Saturday in December, which means we shift into holiday overdrive the morning after turkey day. We get the tree (still a fresh tree, for good or ill) and get out all the […]
With the coming and going of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d come clean about a staple of the holiday feast I have issues with. Cranberry sauce. I don’t like it. Never have. Never will. Yet there it’s been in a place of honor on every traditional Thanksgiving table I’ve ever been at. Editor’s note: If you’re […]
Cheesecake has always been a pretty big thing in my life. When I was growing up, there was a picture of a slice of cheesecake floating in the clouds taped inside our pantry door. That was also as close to a discussion of heaven as ever took place in our house, which may have been […]
As an adult, I’ve come to associate pecan pie with Thanksgiving. When I was younger, it was only pumpkin. I don’t know when this gatecrasher made its way into my four-day weekend. But I’m not fighting it either. Pecan pie is a good thing. So much so that when the current generation of teen servers […]
I should have seen it coming. I should have known that my gum-hating wife would hate any ice cream that had chewing gum in it. For me, as ever, it wasn’t about the gum so much as nostalgia for pre-teen flavors. In this case it was an old Baskin-Robbins ice cream that brought together two […]
