holidays that are good only for their candy options

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OMG + Dinners This Week

Do you realize that THIS WEEK is Thanksgiving? This week! This coming Thursday! If you are not residing in the U.S. at this time, may I move in with you and skip over this extremely wonderful and yet High Stress holiday please and thank you.

My parents are visiting, which is WONDERFUL. They stay in a hotel, which is mutually beneficial. My mother will be making a pumpkin pie – from scratch, using a real pumpkin – with Carla, per Carla’s request. My father will make the Caesar salad. I will make the mashed potatoes. Perhaps I can outsource the dressing to my husband. I don’t know. 

Wait a second. Now I am wondering whether we typically HAVE Caesar salad at Thanksgiving, or if this is a my-family-of-origin Christmas tradition only? I really WANT Caesar salad. But maybe it’s overkill.

I suppose I will make a turkey. I mean, I ordered a turkey already, so I am kind of locked in to making it. This is the only time all year that I eat turkey, because I hate turkey. Is hate too strong a word? How about, I strongly dislike it. It seems kind of silly to put so much work into a thing I really only eat because It’s The Thing You Do At Thanksgiving… (in my family, that is). But everyone else likes it. Maybe even Carla will eat it. And it’s essential to making the gravy I like. Well. I suppose I will ask my mother to help me. She is very good about helping – the giblets don’t squick her out and she is masterful with timing things so they are all ready at once. Why those genes did not express in my DNA, I don’t know, but here we are.

I feel kind of giddy, like I’ve had too much caffeine. Combination of pre-Thanksgiving excitement/anxiety, I suppose. That’ll get your blood buzzing! 

Plus, as per usual, the end of the year just snowballs out of control. I don’t yet have holiday cards! I haven’t purchased a single Christmas present! I have only one single idea what to get Carla for Hanukkah! My mother-in-law arrives two weeks from today! 

Please tell me something calming. I originally typed “clamming.” You could tell me something clamming too, if you like. But something calming would be MOST WELCOME.

In the meantime, we all need to eat in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. Perhaps we shall go for easy and warming. And then we’ll wing it, afterwards, with leftovers and charcuterie boards.

Dinners for Thanksgiving Week 2022

Where are you spending Thanksgiving, US friends? And what are you most looking forward to stuffing into your pie hole eating? What are you having for non-Thanksgiving dinner, non-US friends? 

It seems as though I am doing NaBloPoMo this month, which is 30 blog posts in 30 days. (Will I make it??? Only time will tell.) Details at San’s blog here.

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Halloween Report

We had perfect trick-or-treating weather, I’m just going to say that first.

Second, I will note that I am writing this yesterday (for you), on the night of Halloween, and that as the designated Candy Hander-Outer, I treated myself (see what I did there) to an extra large glass of sauvignon blanc. So. You know. Read this through wine-colored glasses, if you will. Too bad I wasn’t drinking rosé.

Carla was Extremely Serious about trick-or-treating this year. Long past, apparently, are the years when she toddles around our cul-de-sac and comes home, happy and spent, after thirty minutes. Oh no. This year, she was hardly home from school when she began counting down the minutes until six o’clock, which is when our city’s Designated Trick-or-Treating Time begins. (Does your city do this? Mine did not, when I was growing up. Then again, city is a wildly generous term with which to refer to the place I grew up.) If only Carla could apply the same time urgency to getting to school every morning as she did to ensuring she was trick-or-treating at six on the dot! 

She was so Serious that she refused to allow me to take a photo of her. She was a witch. Picture, if you will, a pale blond child with heavy black eye makeup, some of which had migrated in a bruised-looking way to under her eyes, and black lipstick, scowl of determination and sparkly witch’s hat askew on her head, marching into the leaf-scattered twilight, a swath of black polyester and glitter – so much glitter – trailing in her wake. 

(My husband went trick-or-treating with her; she isn’t quite at an age where we feel comfortable releasing her into the wild; dark things traipse about on Halloween night, even in our lovely neighborhood. I forced him to promise to capture her image, somewhere, somehow.)

I remained at home, to hand out treats. 

I had to buy four bags of candy. Candy is HOLY KITKAT EXPENSIVE this year, right alongside everything else I suppose. I bought two bags sight unseen from the Target drive-up service; one of chocolatey things like KitKats and Whoppers and Heath bars, and the other of gummy things like Twizzlers and Sour Patch Kids. They turned out to be tiny bags, with 50 pieces of candy in each bag. And each piece was nothing but a bite. A BITE. I know this because I sampled some or maybe all of the Heath bars. “Fun size” has shrunken by at least 60%, in my estimation. So, in a panic, I went to Target this past weekend. All the good candy (subjective) was gone, and the remaining bags were $10.99 or $15.00 apiece. (I looked at my receipt for the 50-pieces-per-bag purchases; they were only $5.99 per bag, so perhaps I got what I paid for.) I got a giant $15 bag of Tootsie Rolls and Dots mix and a $10.99 bag of Smarties.

This assortment turned out to be… too much. We had far fewer trick-or-treaters than in years past. One of my neighbors said, the other day, that she thinks “they bus the kids in,” based on how many children we usually have streaming down our sidewalks. But this year, it was a slow trickle with little bunches of kids in groups. 

Some observations:

  1. The majority – VAST majority – of our trick-or-treaters seemed to be in that nebulous teenage range. Maybe they were middle schoolers, maybe they were high schoolers; I could not tell. Some were wearing costumes, some were wearing jeans and a hoodie. I handed out candy and overly enthusiastic “Happy Halloweens!” to anyone who dared knock on my door. (One mother came up with three smallish children, none of whom were in costume, and said apologetically that they had all had inflatable costumes, but they had all popped. I told her that I was happy to give candy to any trick-or-treaters, and asked if she wanted some candy; she declined.) 
  2. There was only a small handful of kids Carla’s age-ish.
  3. There was another small handful of kids in the baby-to-toddler range. One little kiddo was wearing an inflatable tractor of some sort. I asked him if he was a bulldozer, and he made an elaborate digging motion and said, “I’m a backhoe.” Thank you, kind sir, for the correction! (It was adorable.)
  4. We lost SO MANY kids to our video doorbell. Let me back up: We have a video doorbell now. I objected strenuously for many years, but finally my husband’s desire for video evidence of… tomfoolery??? won out, and we have one. All the notifications go to his phone, which is the sole satisfaction I get from having this thing. But the trick-or-treaters had no idea how to deal with it! I had the door open (perfect weather) and was sitting in my office (reading blogs, drinking wine) a mere six feet from the door, and overheard several kids saying, “I don’t know how to ring this doorbell!” I guess I figured kids would knock? Or say, “Trick or treat!” or something through the screen? But no. Some of them WALKED AWAY before I could catch them! Oh well???
  5. At one point, I put up a sign that said PLEASE KNOCK! I HAVE CANDY FOR YOU! and I heard one child read it to another; the other child’s unironic response? “Okay, I guess we should ring the bell!” 
  6. I was so un-busy with handing out candy, I may have done a TEENY bit of amazon shopping, I’m sorry!!, sauvignon blanc loosens my wallet and my ability to leave things in my cart overnight. I’m sorry!!! It seemed like a necessity at the time! 
  7. Each Halloween, the children who lived in our house before we moved in come by. They don’t know us; we only know them because they used to come to our neighborhood block party. It’s always slightly uncomfortable, because they will peer behind me into the hall, and whisper to their friends that they used to live here, and they never smile. But this year, I didn’t see any of the kids. I suppose they may have all grown up by now; we’ve lived here eleven years, after all. That makes me a little sad, even if I am also relieved to no longer feel like I stole something precious from them.

Carla came in fairly early. My husband and I both think that next year, we should really make an effort to find her some friends to trick-or-treat with. This goes against my hermit tendencies, but I do think she’d enjoy herself more. She claimed that she’d had fun, but she seemed SO SERIOUS about the whole thing. All business, as my husband said. 

She came home with quite the haul. She organized everything by candy type and counted it all: 89 pieces of candy, 12 of which were Milky Ways, 10 of which were plain M&Ms. I asked her which is her favorite, and she shrugged helplessly. “All?”

Lots of our neighbors give out full-size candy bars, and it lit a competitive flame inside my husband. He wants to hand out full-size candy next year. “We don’t want to be the house with the bad candy,” he told me earnestly. No, honey. No we don’t. 

I continue to love Halloween. It is so stress-free and I love how strangers and neighbors alike open their homes and candy bowls for children they may or may not know. I love the joy in dressing up. I love seeing children of all ages making the rounds, no matter what they are wearing. I love how many teenagers commented on Carla’s pumpkins. I love how friendly the night becomes. It makes me feel so warm and happy and full of tenderness for our children and one another. It was a good night.

I hope your Halloween was as charming and balmy as mine was.

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Halloween, Dinners This Week

Alert! Alert! It is the last day of October! 

Usually, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It’s so low-obligation, plus there’s candy, plus you get to see adorable kids and their semi-embarrassed parents marching around the sidewalks. It’s a lovely holiday. 

This year, I didn’t even put up my bats. My bats are my FAVORITE decoration of all the decorations I own, and I just couldn’t summon enough energy to put them up (or to contemplate the inevitability of taking them down). I (Carla) finally put up our yard ghosties, and we bought some pumpkins, so I feel like I made SOME effort even if it was wildly late.

This ghost is as aghast as I am that tomorrow is NOVEMBER. What the what.

Carla insisted on carving our pumpkins yesterday. I have managed to avoid jack-o-lanterning since… 2019, maybe? I can’t remember. But it has been several years. I have to admit that I didn’t miss it. It’s so messy and I don’t like the feeling of pumpkin innards, and I hate how strenuous an activity it is, to remove said innards. Plus, pumpkin juice leaves my hands feeling weirdly mask-like, even after thorough washing. But Carla was insistent, so I was game; I am at the point in her childhood where I am wondering, “How many more [fill in the magical childhood event of your choice] will we have left?” and I’m trying desperately to Cherish. So I cherished some pumpkin-juicy hands and pumpkin guts all over my floor. But! The best part! CARLA DID ALL THE CARVING. All I did was remove one pumpkin lid (my husband did the other one) and scrape at some of the most recalcitrant innards. She did everything else, from planning the design to doing the actual carving. She even cleaned up (most of) the mess! And rinsed and strained the pumpkin seeds that she’d lovingly saved from the fate of the guts! It was wonderful. Nine is a stellar age, I’m telling you.

This cat-o-lantern has ears AND a bow-tie!

Carla is excited to go trick-or-treating (although she is overly worried, in my opinion, about this rumor/conspiracy theory that’s going around about drugs disguised as brightly colored candy; I think it’s bunk and that anyone who spends money on drugs or makes money from drugs would not just HAND THEM OUT to children, who – in addition to having no idea where they got said drug-candy – have no financial means to continue to BUY drugs, but she is hearing this from FAMILY and also from FRIENDS AT SCHOOL OMG, so I guess I understand why she is edgy) (we know all our neighbors and we inspect all her candy anyway) and I am excited to watch her traipse around to the neighbors’ houses, where many of them have secreted special full-size candy or little candy bags just for her. 

We have the best neighborhood for trick-or-treating. Our houses are fairly close together, we know nearly all of our neighbors, there are tons of kids. When the weather is nice, some of the neighbors set up tables and chairs on their driveways so they can really get involved in the trick-or-treating process. It’s wonderful. 

I am making tacos tonight, because they are easy and Carla likes them enough that she might actually eat some before she goes out on her candy-procurement mission. The rest of the week, well… I think I’ll make a pot of butternut squash soupto have on nights when my husband and I eat separately (he eats a ham sandwich, though maybe I’ll surprise him with turkey! I am so fun.) instead of black bean tacos. For the other nights, I’m feeling more adventurous than I have in awhile. We’ll see how long that lasts, won’t we.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done a grocery store report. In large part because things seems to have stabilized somewhat (except for prices HOLY CAULIFLOWER it is more than $100 every time I set foot in the grocery store), or at least I’ve grown to roll with the occasional random shortages. However, my grocery shopping experience today was a little distressing — the vegetable situation was GRIM. We’re talking two red bell peppers and five stunted zucchini (zucchinis? zucchinii?) and NO ICEBERG LETTUCE level grim. But I circled around to the produce section a few times, and finally there was a big pile of iceberg lettuce heads (this is Carla’s preferred lettuce for tacos, hence the urgency), and, even better, they were on sale at 2-for-$5 rather than “on sale” for 2-for-$7 which is what they’ve been going for lately. I think I’d just hit the store too early, before things were restocked from the weekend.

(Small aside: Our grocery store staff is extremely kind and helpful, and I have often approached a staff member in the produce section and asked whether there is something available in the back, and sometimes there IS. I was going to try this approach this morning, especially because a staff member was a) wheeling out a big cartload of bagged lettuce varieties and b) she’d already brought something out for another customer. But then after she handed over the spinach to the person who’d asked for it, the staff member heaved a huge sigh and groaned “oy vey” under her breath in a manner far too world-weary for nine in the morning, so I moved along without bothering her.

I did buy a bottle of non-Huy Fong sriracha in my store’s house brand. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to try it yet. But I fear that the chili pepper / sriracha shortage is going to outlast my small stockpile, and I need to find an alternative.

I also bought two cartons of yogurt that expired yesterday, so that was annoying. But that’s on me, I guess, for only doing a quick check of the expiration date of one yogurt and assuming that all flavors would expire on the same date. They do NOT; the expiries vary wildly from yesterday to December 5. Let that be a warning to you.

Dinners for the Week of October 31-November 6

  • Ground Beef Tacos
  • Garlic Balsamic Crusted Pork Tenderloin: This sounds yummy and I haven’t made it in AGES. I think I’ll throw some root veggies into the oven to roast alongside the pork. 
  • One Pan Pesto Chicken: This is a new one for me, but it sounds good (sans tomato, of course) and fairly easy, maybe?
  • Sheet Pan Crispy Salmon and Potatoes: This sounds good and I have some salmon filets ready to go in the freezer. Now I just need to find some good looking asparagus that isn’t mind-blowingly expensive. 
  • Butternut Squash Soup: This is so easy, even if it does involve chopping an onion. I just use cubed frozen butternut squash and it’s fine. The last time I made it, it was a teeny bit watery, so I am going to add a third bag of squash to the mix without adjusting any of the other elements of the recipe. I also bought a loaf of sourdough from the grocery store bakery and I have Big Plans [Confidential to those of you who hate mushrooms: LOOK AWAY] about sautéing some mushrooms with a little butter and garlic, and spreading the mushrooms on some Swiss cheese on top of a buttered slice of the sourdough and cooking it, grilled cheese style. That would make a delicious side to my soup, wouldn’t it now. 

Now I need to go find a bowl big enough for all the candy I plan to dole out to our trick-or-treaters.

Happy Halloween, Internet! I hope your night is full of treats! 

Carla was eager to buy a yellow pumpkin this year, and now I’m wondering why we don’t buy yellow pumpkins every year?! Wishing you a purrrr-fect Halloween.