Fat Season

You know, it's some unspoken rule in our house that stipulates that any given day throughout the year, we have to have a ridiculous amount of junk food on hand.

And for the life of me, I have no idea why.

It's not like we really get down on the whole junk food thing, either; Kris doesn't eat a lot of sweets (besides chocolates, mind you), and I try to watch my caloric intake as much as humanly possible (as I hate exercising just as much as I hate Tina Fey... which is a lot).  We even monitor our kids' intake of sweets probably moreso than other parents, if only because our kids taken to sugar like sharks in a feeding frenzy.  Yet despite our indifference/staunch opposition to the food group, we seem to constantly have an abundance of it around the house.

I blame holidays.

It starts around Halloween, with Halloween cookies and Trick or Treat candy, etc.  Just as you're coming off the tail-end of 'leftover season' with that whole ordeal, you're blindsided with Thanksgiving, which - while not having cookies or candy, as it were - still features more than it's fair share of deserts.  We're not huge fans of Thanksgiving (who can blame us), but we still celebrate it as best we can, and that means buying sugary crap we usually pass up on.

'Cause we're stupid.

Which brings us to Round Three:  Christmas.  Thanksgiving, as we all know, is more or less the kick-off for this season, which, by my calculations, is now approximately four months long.  This means that, starting in late November, one can expect a dramatic increase in chocolates, candy canes, fruit cakes, and cookie imports.

If you're on a diet, this is Hell Season.

For Yours Truly, this is indeed a bad couple of months.  While not necessarily having a 'sweet tooth,' I do fancy myself a holiday cordial, Christmas liqueur, or - probably most significantly - an egg nog or six on a regular basis throughout the season.

Egg nog may be the greatest-tasting flavor on Earth, which is why they only release it once a year, for a measely five or six weeks, and why it consequently has about 700 calories per 1/2 cup serving.

That might be an exageration, but I'm not off by much.

Anyway, like I was saying, Christmas is Hell in sugar-form, and once you've gained your Holiday Weight at the end of the season, you have about two or three weeks of sweating out all the access sugar before Valentine's Day rears it's red, sugary head and barrels down upon you.  Then there's St. Patrick's Day, and all the green beer you can stomach. . .

A vicious cycle, which I could continue to spell out for you, but I'm going to cut 'er off here and show you some bizarre Christmas Cookie pictures instead.

Enjoy.

Our kids. 'Helping'

Eating some of Grandma Jordan's famous Peanut Butter Fudge

Will someone PLEASE buy my wife a rolling pin?

Breaking out the cookie cutters

One big ball of dough.

Baking.

Rushing through dinner in order to take part in the decorating process. . .

May this poor excuse for a Santa cookie haunt your dreams. . .

Those are supposed to be buttons on the snow man's front, but the black icing was really runny. . . so instead it looks like someone gave the poor guy a Cleveland Steamer.

SPRINKLES.

Not impressed.

Abby never completely got the hang of this. . .

I'm pretty terrible at this.

There must be some pre-school mantra out there that dictates that the more sprinkles a cookie has, the better it is.

This year's finished batch.  Not quite the thing of legend, if truth be told.

- Brian