Holidays

I love holidays.  I look forward to almost all of them, even those from which I get no more direct effect than knowing that most of my extended family gets a day off work.  (I get off work all the time since 1997, unless I choose to do some sculpting or yard work etc.)

I have a somewhat unusual reaction to Halloween and to Easter.  The holidays themselves are celebrated by our families in a most traditional way, but the day after each of these holidays is a day of great temptation.

I try to watch my weight.  In the last year or so I have lost over seventy pounds. (I still weigh two hundred pounds but I have gone from a forty six inch waist to a thirty eight inch waist which has resulted in most of my wardrobe finding its way to Goodwill.)

The real problem with the holidays mentioned above is that some evil genius organized things so that on the day after the holiday (or even in the four or five days after these holidays) all the chocolate in the world goes on sale at prices that seem next to nothing.  This results in a sort of love/hate relationship that I have to these holidays.

To give an example, on the day after Halloween, I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some necessaries. (mouth wash, denture adhesive, and foot medicine for my neuropathy, all very necessary to me and many folks may age.) At the entrance of Wally World thousands of pounds of candy were placed so that no entrance could be made to any department without walking past it.  I was strong however.  I (sort of) ignored it all and got to the pharmacy department unscathed, but on my way to the checkout I weakened and I ended up with a Wal-Mart plastic bag with ten or fifteen pounds of Reese’s peanut butter cups, Dove chocolate pumpkins, regular, peanut, and peanut butter M & M’s, Snickers bars, Milky Way bars. Three Musketeer bars, Hershey bars (all kinds) etc. for a total cost of about five bucks.  If Ghirardelli, or Lindt chocolate had been on sale at those prices the gross weight of my packages would have doubled.

Now I have all this chocolate, plus the leftover cookies from trick or treat sitting around my house and I have got to figure out  a way to keep from stuffing it all in my mouth in one or two days.  Today I limited my self by working like a slave in my yard, doing things I have procrastinated for months.  Tomorrow I am leaving to spend a long weekend with my daughter in Columbia South Carolina, and from there go to a time share in Tennessee for five days.  If I am lucky, gremlins will have stolen into my house and eaten all the chocolate.

My son Stuart will be house sitting while we are gone, and if I come home and he has gained twenty pounds, I will have a guilty conscience  for the rest of the year.

Of course Thanksgiving (another excuse for gluttony) will be coming up soon but at least Thanksgiving isn’t at discount rated.

I don’t know if our time share has wi-fi, so I may not get to the computer for the next ten days, but it isn’t as if I have kept my resolution to post at least once weekly anyway.