Sensible eating makes no sense
around Christmas cookies
By Burton W. Cole
Is there anything as senseless as sensible eating?
As a bachelor, I prepared my own nutritious suppers (that's known as dinner to you city folk. I grew up eating dinner at noon. Lunch was what you packed for picnics. See — second paragraph in and we're already stacking up senselessness like layers of bologna between a mayo-slathered bun).
Anyway, supper was a couple of big bowls of Alpha-Bits or Reese's Puffs, each PACKED with 12 ESSENTIAL vitamins and minerals.
Then I got married.
My wife, a lovely, intelligent woman who claims to adore me, actually packs raw cucumber slices or stringy celery stalks in my lunch. I am not making this up.
I cannot fathom how anyone who claims to love me could commit such a disgusting deed during Christmas candy and cookies season.
“It's called a sensible diet,” Terry cooed in my ear. “All that sugary cereal is horrible for you. The same with lava cake and chocolate-chip cookies — it messes with your system.”
I know what's messing with my sense and sensibilities and it's a sensible diet, the most senseless thing invented since running for the fun of it.
“You know what else you do that irks the stuffing and gravy out of me?” I groused at her over a plate of carrot sticks.
“Dip the carrots in hummus,” she purred. “It's good for you.”
I shuddered. Where had she hidden my emergency bottle of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup? At least I could look forward to those couple of bags of Oreos I'd stashed in my desk drawer at the office. For my health. After stopping for a milkshake on the way to work. To steady my nerves.
I crunched a stub of raw carrot. “I'm serious. My shirts are growing smaller and the waistbands on my pants are shrinking. Are the washer and dryer messed up? Or do you need lessons on how to do laundry?”
After I picked myself up off the floor, where I'd suddenly splatted under mysterious circumstances, Terry, a bit flushed, mused, “Kind of funny that your pants snaps are too short around to any longer meet in the middle, but the legs stretch just as long as they did before.”
Then she proposed a theory so ridiculous that it made me swell in fiery indignation.
“I don't believe it's your indignation that's popping your buttons,” she said. “We better stick to just salad for supper.”
“I need a sensible lunch,” I grumbled. “Gotta be some gingerbread men or Christmas fudge around here somewhere.”
It was about then that Terry uttered a series of swear words. If “diet” and “exercise” aren’t profanity, then I don’t know what is.
In my active teens, I appeared to be a walking, 6-foot string bean minus the green. People shoved pizza, hamburgers and Coke at me to prevent me from snapping in a gust of wind, or a mild breeze.
Then one day I set down my teenage metabolism, just for a second, but forgot where. I thought I saw the cat batting it around once, but it turned out to be a mini Snickers. I wiped off the fuzz and swallowed it, just in case, but nope, it didn't contain a molecule of metabolism. I'm still looking.
Terry sent me to a doctor, but even with her stethoscope and that shiny flashlight thing, she couldn't detect a trace of metabolism.
“It's time,” she said, “that we put you on a sensible diet.” She reeled off a harvest of words that didn't make a lick of sense, such as “turnips,” “rutabaga,” “kohlrabi” and “zucchini.”
I haven't started on any of it. Until sensible eating makes sense, I'm sticking to Yule logs and peppermint bark. For supper. Because it makes sense.
Meet Burt beneath the Christmas tree at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or at www.burtonwcole.com for some thick eggnog and frosted snowmen cookies.