I am not a big fan of Christmas, and don’t really ever plan
on being a big fan of Christmas. Most of the time, I am too busy being a
scrooge about people starting the holidays too soon, and the next thing I know,
Christmas is two days away and I still have five people to shop for. This
completely ruins my holiday, and I usually just give up on shopping, settling
with a DVD box set for my father that he will never watch. My general rules for
Christmas are simple: don’t play Christmas songs until two weeks before
Christmas, don’t ask me to go caroling, and don’t sing Christmas songs at me. I
don’t think I am asking too much with these rules, but of course I am labeled “Scrooge”
the day after Thanksgiving when I say, “It’s not Christmas yet.”
But this year, I was off to a better start, mostly because I
was given an advent calendar. I never had one before, and the daily shot of cheap,
molded chocolate made it so that I was less likely to snap at a rule breaker
when he or she decided to sing “Jingle Bell Rock” in my general direction. I
kept the calendar propped up against the wall on my stove, and each day, I
would wake up, open the door on my calendar, eat my crappy chocolate, and leave
for work, prepared to face the holidays.
This went well enough for about ten days, until I got the
biggest craving for tater tots I have ever had in my life. Back in Provo, I was
lucky enough to have a roommate who was addicted to tater tots and fast food.
And so every week or so, we would find ourselves at Sonic, where I could keep
my cravings at bay. But since I don’t have roommates anymore, I don’t have an
excuse to get fast food, so when I get a craving, it becomes the worst craving
I have ever had in my life. So to satisfy my urges, I paced across the street
to Target, grabbed the biggest bag of tater tots I could find, and then tromped
back across the street to enjoy my bounty. Things were going well enough: I had
my tots in the oven, Fargo on DVD, and I hadn’t seen a cockroach in days. But
because I can’t have good things going for me for more than two minutes,
tragedy struck.
Apparently, when the oven is on, the area surrounding the
oven becomes hot as well. Not expecting this, I still had my advent calendar
propped up against the wall, where it heated up and then preceded to melt. I
didn’t realize what was happening at first, but I could smell something really
sweet in the kitchen. My first thought was to blame the neighbors, but then I
looked and found chocolate seeping through my cardboard calendar, onto my
stove, and streaking down the wall. My first instinct was, “Oh no! I need to
eat tomorrow’s chocolate!” So I propped open day eleven and started to lick the
remaining droplets of chocolate that were still in the mold.
Few things in life gross me out; I work with sewage and I am
a microbiologist, I have been desensitized to most things. But one thing in
life that makes me queasy would be the sight of melted chocolate. Obviously,
the adrenaline from the initial shock of my whole situation made me forget
about my issues with melted chocolate, until, of course, after two licks in. I
snapped back into reality and I felt like I should induce vomiting. Finally I
gathered my senses and put the calendar in the freezer so that the chocolate
could set.
The day after the incident, I went to my freezer to eat my
daily chocolate. But lo and behold, when I opened up the cardboard window, I
found that all of the chocolate had melted into each other, making a monsterish
conglomerate of crappy chocolate. I couldn’t just not eat my daily chocolate,
so I decided that the whole frozen, chocolate mess would be my gift for
December 11th , and I ate the whole thing in one sitting.
After eating the remnants of my advent calendar, I realized
I had no more daily gifts for the countdown to Christmas, which must mean that
Christmas is over and I can finally get regular music back on the radio. This of course didn’t happen, and so I am back
to being a “Scrooge.”
