Wednesday, 1/29

It's been over a month. Have you finished eating all of your Christmas gifts yet?

I don't know if you're like me, but a big chunk of the gifts I'm given over the holidays, maybe even half, consists of food. Chocolate makes up a large majority of it, but you could count cookies, nuts, fruit, a whole collection of Southern food from my niece Courtney, living in South Carolina, and, well, more chocolate as part of the sum total. I don't mind; after all, people know how much Loraine and I like certain kinds of food, and that makes us easy people for whom to buy, I guess.

Of course, that means that after the holidaze both Loraine and I have a lot of food to eat. The chocolate's not a problem, especially the huge collection sent to us each and every year by daily blog readers Floyd & Betsy of Reese (thanks, other Mom & Dad!), but the other stuff—especially the perishable items like fruit or semi-perishable stuff like cookies—do need to get eaten before they go bad. And that usually means they they need to be gone by, say, now.

We're almost done with those items. Are you?

I mean, you may not have to worry about it. You may not have a lot of food given to you over the holidays, and you may not feel the pressure to get it all consumed by a certain date. Maybe that's just us. And maybe that's just karma biting us on the butt for spreading out 30,000 calories of cookies to friends and family before the holidays, and maybe karma doesn't feel the need to pay back you and yours.

Maybe.

One system that we have found that works is this—we sample each and every thing we're given. More often than not, we end up consuming the whole gift. But on occasion, especially if it's one of several of a certain kind we've been given, or if it's of a taste with which we may not be totally enthralled, we'll “donate” the rest of it to Loraine's office mates. Unlike me, she works with a big staff of people, a staff of people who don't mind sampling food brought in by coworkers. In that way, it's a win-win—they enjoy it, and we manage to get all the food consumed before it goes bad.

See? We've thought this through.

We appreciate all the food we're given each year, and enjoy sampling every single thing that's given to us. We're actually planning on using the Southern grab bag that Courtney gave us to make a big dinner sometime soon, and in one of the most amazing bits of serendipitous timing ever, it looks like the German chocolate Loraine's parents gave us will last us until around the end of April.

You know—right around the time we actually go back to Germany to replenish our supply.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com), who hopes that YOU'VE managed to eat your way through all of your yummy Christmas gifts!