While I was sitting here eating Christmas cookies — my sole raison d’être for existing — a thought arose: how come we don’t eat Christmas cookies all year long instead of cramming all that sugary goodness into a tiny two week window at the end of December?
Cookie cravings know no season
Everyone loves cookies and we love them all year round. No one doesn’t like cookies in January or July. Cookie season is every season. Yet chocolate peanut butter blossoms (not the name I call them) arrive on my counter but once a year like Santa Claus himself — and I consume them non-stop until my stomach screams in agony as I shovel Gas-X down my throat in response.
I understand not molding the cookie into a candy cane or an angel or Christmas tree out of season, but the cookie itself — why not:
- a heart-shaped sugar cookie in February,
- a cookie wearing a winter coat in the morning accompanied on the plate with a cookie wearing a t-shirt in the evening for March,
- a rain cloud cookie in April, and
- a flower cookie in May?
April showers bring May flowers, after all. They should bring cookies, too. In a yet to be peer-reviewed study involving a questionnaire given to my kids, I asked them: would you eat sugar cookies outside of December? The answer: a resounding yes!
- A sunshine sugar cookie in June: Would anyone decline?
- A Shark Week themed sugar cookie in July: Cue the Jaws theme. I’m out of the water but into that suggestion. Let the feeding frenzy of sugary bliss commence.
In theory I understand why we don’t allow for homemade cookies 365 days a year. We gift ourselves roughly 35 days of gluttony between Thanksgiving and the New Year to pack on the pounds. It’s a permission-based excess we blame on celebrating with family and friends. But is the heart of the reason we get together with family to see each other or is it because dang, look at all that delicious food? Then on the first day of January, we’re all like, “I’m going to get fit this year.”
That’s noble.
As I’m typing this now, my stomach is filled with sharp pangs because instead of eating a well-balanced meal today including the necessary evil that is a salad, I sat around eating a plethora of sugar cookies awaiting a glazed treatment whenever my wife left the kitchen.
“Honey, I think a package was delivered to you on the front porch by UPS. Better go check.”
// Nom nom nom. //
They looked so lonely and constricted locked away in plastic containers. I swear I even heard one say, “You can save me by putting me in your stomach… now.”
So I obliged.
Because what’s a man to do if you have Tupperware stacked sky high with cookies just sitting there? You eat them, of course.
If food is a universal language, Christmas cookies are the sweet dialect. Is it not in our national interest to bring our families together in the kitchen and liberate the homemade cookie across our land? After more than three hundred years since the sugar cookie’s invention by the German protestant settlers of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, have we not waited long enough? We threw tea into a harbor in 1773. Can we not throw homemade sugar cookies into our bellies in January or June 2024?
I rest my case.
Now where’s the Pepto?
Thank you for reading. And now for the calls to action. Dig this essay? You may dig these, too:
- A Christmas (Eve) to Remember
- What Christmas Movie Would You Want to Be In?
- No Parent Has Any Earthly Idea What They are Doing
Feeling generous this holiday season? Click this link to show your support for my writing by donating $5/month or $50/year. Your support helps this blog remain ad-free and free for everyone to read.
You can also subscribe to get updates of new posts by email:
Share this: