Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you made it through the holiday season unscathed and un-stranded by crazy weather.

I’m still recovering from the lingering side-effects of my COVID booster (or something; who knows), so we spent a quiet December. Good food, good medical care, and visits with family left me feeling immensely grateful.

However…

As you’ve no doubt come to expect, I didn’t make it through the season without a generous measure of foolishness. Case in point: The Christmas shortbread.

Every year I do some baking to give as gifts:  Goodies like gingersnaps and snickerdoodles, along with a confection from my childhood dubbed ‘Cherry Flips’ (a maraschino cherry wrapped in almond shortbread, dunked in cherry frosting, and dusted with coconut)… and shortbread.

Tasty though it is, plain shortbread looks bland and unappetizing. So I usually decorate it with red and green cherries in wreath shapes to make it look a bit more festive.  But this year I really wasn’t feeling very well (and to be honest, I was a bit stoned on anti-nausea pills). So I decided to take a simpler approach with red and green coloured sugar.  I experimented with a few different patterns, and decided on one reminiscent of evergreen swags with a red accent:

I painstakingly applied the sugar to each cookie and baked the lot of them.  Then, as I was tucking the finished shortbread into gift packages, a terrible thought occurred to me. To describe it in proper Seussian style, it was a terrible, horrible, awful idea:

“These cookies look like a Grinch butt with hemorrhoids.”

Once that mental image is lodged in your brain, you can never un-see it.  (Sorry about that.)

I didn’t know what to do.  On one hand, surely nobody else in the world would think of that… would they?  But on the other hand, I felt vaguely guilty handing out baked goods with diseased butts on them.

In the end I gave away the goodies as planned, secure in the knowledge that my friends and family are much nicer and more refined than I.  Even if they thought the decorations were questionable, they’re far too polite to comment.

Unlike me.

So if you received Grinch-Ass shortbread from me this year, I sincerely apologize.  I promise it won’t happen again. (But my inner twelve-year-old will snicker about it forever more.)

Did anyone else have food-related ‘oopses’ over the holidays?

Book 18 progress: Sadly, none. I was feeling too crappy to work; and I still have to gulp anti-nausea tablets if I’m going to look at computer screen for more than a few minutes at a time. Hoping to report more progress (and less nausea) soon!