It’s a relaxing Saturday night. I’ve got the Christmas tunes going, with a side dish (or bottle) of Sam Adams Holiday Porter, a beer that I’m fairly sure was flavored with lumber. It’s nice and cold out, and fittingly, it really felt like December today. There’s a certain kind of cold associated with December, and it’s got little to do with temperature. It’s just a thick, heavy-but-clean kind of cold. It’s a bitch when you aren’t in the mood for it, but when you are, the world is a tremendous place.

I was really going for a nice, ambient Christmas motif in the photo above, but I think the vague view of my oven and Sweet’N Low container might’ve killed the mood. Sorry.

New or not-so-new from Pepperidge Farm, it’s the “Ginger Family” cookie collection! Something about this whole thing resonates as an oddity. Maybe it’s that people-shaped gingerbread cookies always present a bit of guilt for those who eat them, and here, they’ve gone one step further by creating an entire family. I am willing to accept that most gingerbread men are cognizant of their ultimate fate, but what about their wives and children? Is our desire to snack worth turning these families’ worlds upside-down?

The cookies manage to be in the correct relative scale, with a big father, gigantic mother, and a son and daughter who are either really affable or merely conjoined twins.

Since I don’t particularly care for gingerbread cookies, I don’t have to spend the night arguing with my conscience over whether it’s okay to diminish this family’s size or not. Course, that begs the question of why I bought them to begin with. I have no good answer for that.

I recently wrote about how we chucked around four metric tons of Christmas decorations into the trash this year, in an effort to cleanse our souls and collective storage space. Now that I look around again, it doesn’t seem like we made much of a dent. There was just so much crap that had too much sentimental value to kill. Example: The piece of trash shown above.

I can’t remember where I got it, but I’ve had it for around a decade. I’m not even sure what it is. The plastic decoration stands around 4″ tall, and if I had to make a guess, I’d say it’s a roller coaster designed by someone who really wasn’t of sound mind to design roller coasters. We’ve got a million similarly nonsensical Christmas decorations swarming our apartment like immobile locusts, and though we made an attempt to improve our feng shui, my new stance is “fuck it.” I like my stupid decorations. I don’t want them to end up smashed at some hellhole landfill, with only toxic chemicals and dirty diapers to care for them. Christmas decorations, even ones that look like retarded roller coasters, deserve better.

Finally, there’s a new kind of candy corn in town, and it’s totally Christmassy. “Reindeer Corn” is a title that makes little sense to me, but that’s what they’re calling it, and I suppose it’s up to us to justify why. What do they mean by “reindeer corn?” I’m putting this question to all of you. All of my answers are scatological and sound like they came from a five-year-old.

The red, green and white candies are a bit bigger than traditional candy corn pieces, but they taste just the same. I’m no fan of candy corn, but they look great in a tabletop candy bowl. It’s okay to buy candy for purely decorative purposes, right?

This is your SNT. Are you here for your SNT?

EDIT: Advent Calendar: December 2nd is now active!

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!