Last week was my department’s annual Yankee Swap, a tradition that I myself started years ago to fill the camaraderie void in our holiday lunch left by the lack of alcohol. Despite being the Swap’s progenitor and facilitator, every year I get seriously screwed gift-wise. It’s enough to smash my faith in the gift economy.
During this year’s Swap, I started out with a “Don’t Break the Bottle” Wooden Wine Puzzle, which I promptly swapped for a bottle of limoncello lemon liqueur. Perhaps my downfall was going after a covetable present, for the limoncello was promptly taken away from me and I ended up with a stuffed gopher golf club cover. Underwhelmed, I then engaged in a serious of unofficial afterhours swaps — the gopher for a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly, which I swapped for the wine puzzle (again!), and finally the wine puzzle for a tin of peppermint bark.
Oh god, peppermint bark. Just what a health-conscious woman in her early 30s wants: Milk chocolate mixed with white chocolate and topped with ground candy canes. “A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” I vowed to place the tin in the kitchen area for the department to enjoy/take off my lips and hips. Since everyone was stuffed from the holiday lunch, I decided to wait until Monday.
So today when I got to work, the peppermint bark weighed heavy on my mind. Despite an extensive breakfast of toast and neufchatel, the previous two days of XC skiing and snow shoveling had revved my appetite into overdrive, and when I placed the peppermint bark tin in the kitchen area, my hand reached out and broke off a huge chunk before I scuttled back to my desk.
“Why did I do that?” I asked myself. It was 8:30am, and there I was, nibbling on the peppermint bark with little sighs of contentment. An hour later, my ration of bark was gone and I needed more tea. I headed to the kitchen area and noticed that less than half of the bark remained. Again, my hand reached out and broke off another chunk of bark.
“Why did I do that?” I asked myself, again. The second-helping of peppermint bark steadily disappeared from my paper towel. The sugar did wonders for my morale. I may be in the office, heaping concentration upon my work until my brain sweated, but at least I had peppermint bark.
Ten minutes after I finished my second helping of peppermint bark, a co-worker dropped by with a dark chocolate snowman as a Christmas present. My mouth had the taste of sugar in it. I unwrapped the snowman, smashed its hollow vessel, and fed myself chocolate shards for the next hour. By then it was 11am, and I had probably eaten an entire RDA of calories in candy.
After a cleansing lunch of flatbread with hummus and cucumbers, a co-worker came by and invited me to a cake celebration for a departing co-worker. What, am I going to be the skinny bitch who goes to a goodbye party and refuses cake? So I ate a slice of thick, heavy cake. My blood sugar surged into my skull like a spurting oil well.
The sugar binge reminded me of when bears happen upon a beehive. It’s rare for a bear to actually encounter a beehive, but when they do, they are capable of eating up to 5 pounds of honey in one sitting. Some days, particularly cold snow-filled days leading up to a holiday, you gotta go for the sugar. You just gotta go for the 5 pounds of honey.
