With only a month (!!!) left before Christmas, it seems I should get a move on if I'm gonna stand any chance of covering all of the holiday junk I bought.

So, for what seems like the 83rd time this week, let's talk about ice cream.

Every suburb has its supermarkets. There's the good one, the bad one, the familiar one, and even the exotic one that you only hear about by eavesdropping on gabbing commuters.

Then there's the dilapidated one that you occasionally visit out of sheer loyalty. It's the oldest landmark in town. It's been there longer than you have. It's dusty. It's one of those supermarkets where you have to check every expiration date, even on stuff like bouillon cubes. Yet, you feel like the world will end if you don't pay tribute to it at least once a year.

You know, I'm rereading that last paragraph, and I think I sound crazy. I hope I'm not alone in this supermarket guilt thing. I'm already alone in so much else.

For me, that reeking treasure is our nearest Pathmark. That's where I found these holiday ice cream treats. Thank you, Pathmark. I hope they're not from last Christmas.

Made by Kemps, there are two varieties available. The first, Frosty Trees, are shaped like Christmas trees and decorated with candy bits, which form what are either tree ornaments or a level from Centipede. The ice cream is mint flavored. "Dickless pistachio," as the crass call it.

The more spirited variety is Winter Snowmen. This time, snowmen wearing devious expressions seek the illusion of warmth by way of strawberry ice cream scarves. These scarves are extremely fragile, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me four package-shreds to successfully free a Winter Snowman without breaking his neck.

EDIT: As someone pointed out, those are bow ties, not scarves. But we can pretend.

There are fairly gigantic discrepancies between the illustrations on the boxes and their real ice cream counterparts. In short, I feel gypped. The snowmen were supposed to look plump and gleeful, not like albino spies. And the trees shouldn't look crouching trolls, callously trying to break into other trolls' secret lairs.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that these obvious popsicles arrive without sticks. I have no idea how I'm supposed to eat them. There are no candy shells. There's nothing to grab onto without making a mess.

"Just use the wrappers," you say. Okay, but why did I pay a premium for ice cream shaped like snowmen, then? If I can't see them, I may as well eat unshaped ice cream out of a boring tub. At least my fingers would feel less like the frozen lichen of Antarctica.

I wish "bitchin' lichen" rhymed. It looks like it should.

"Put them in bowls," you say. I say NO. My gripe falls apart as soon as bowls are introduced, I concede. What?

See? They're so much better with popsicle sticks, even when they're planted in buggy soil. That's where the trolls who masquerade as trees go to mate. So disgusting.

There's a lot we can take Kemps to task for, here. On the other hand, they're still ice cream treats shaped like snowmen and Christmas trees. This illustrates why the world's top corporate motivators always insist that we can succeed in failure.

I'm not going to give you a bad grade, Kemps. I'm going to give you a beautiful B+.

Tomorrow on X-E: My stance on abortion.