I won a giant gingerbread house.
…that’s the short version. I won a giant gingerbread house.
It’s huge, it’s delicate, and it smells so sincere. Good God, the smell! Glade might try to make it into an aerosol mist, but only the genuine articles smell like this.
I won it from that Christmas fair. The one I’ve been going to since childhood. The one I wrote about last year. The one I wrote about almost a decade ago.
If you’ve been reading me, you know the drill. The star of the fair is its parade of “raffle baskets.” You buy tickets and trade them for chances at various gift baskets, donated by presumed Catholics and filled with all sorts of prizes.
One basket might have a few LEGO sets. Another might come with a serving dish and a certificate to score ten free pounds of calamari from a nearby seafood market. Still another might include a teddy bear, warm cheese and a gravy boat. You generally wouldn’t waste tickets on that one. Read More…
That cheese with the nuts around it.
No Christmas season is complete without THAT CHEESE.
I don’t know if there’s an official term for it. They’re essentially hockey pucks made of cheese, rimmed with crushed almonds.
I cannot remember a Christmas Eve without them. They sometimes appeared during Thanksgiving or even the scattered birthday party, but Christmas Eve was/is the big one.
As a child, I was obsessed with this cheese. My Italian family always had seafood-rich menus on Christmas Eve, and since I hated seafood, this cheese was basically my dinner.
It’d be one of the first things put out for consumption, and I’d spend seven hours trying to keep everyone else away from it. Had I a stick and a fluency in German, I’d have been smacking fingers and yelling “Mein Käse!”
This magical cheese comes in a variety of shapes of sizes, but around here, nothing has ever trumped the three-pack. It’s always looked just like this. There’s something comforting about that. In a world where so few things stay standard, I can always count on this cheese. Read More…
TMNT “Capture the Kraang” Game!
Right, like I was going to pass this up.
“Capture the Kraang” is a clever spin on the old game where you use a little rod to yank fake fish out of a plastic pool. As the title suggests, they’ve replaced the fish with eight goddamned snapping Kraang.
It’s a miniature version of a much larger set. (Thanks for the tip, Dan!) This version was being sold in Target’s stocking stuffer section, and since I’m weirdly obsessed with that “genre,” I prefer it to the bigger one. I could easily see it enveloped in red plush, neighboring with candy bars and Crayola crayons. Read More…
Holiday Goldfish Crackers x1000.
If “Christmas” and “Pepperidge Farm Goldfish” both rank high on the list of things you adore, you are so unbelievably covered.
We’ve seen Christmassy Goldfish before, but never this many at the same time. The only reasonable inference is that Pepperidge Farm Goldfish is the official snack of the holiday season.
The volume is almost bizarre, especially when you consider that I found all three varieties at the same store, and that two of them are the exact same flavor. Since Pepperidge Farm is effectively competing against itself, we may surmise that the top of the mountain is a cold and lonely place.
Normal people needn’t buy three bags of Goldfish, so I’ll do my best to help you make an educated decision. This process involves writing without much thought until each paragraph looks long enough. For instance, by the time I’m done with this sentence, this paragraph will. Read More…