Set up the Christmas tree and decorations, catch up with family members, eat a little turkey dinner then...?  If you said shop, you were wrong.  You curl up and sleep off the meal while the game plays in the background.  Yep, Calvin knows how to celebrate Thanksgiving.

It is in this holiday season that we pause for a word of warning.  I decided to make my famous brioche then had an idea.  Why not add chocolate chips.  I mean, what cannot be improved by chocolate, right?  However, the bread machine I use to mix the dough warms just a little to help the yeast alone.  Unfortunately, it also warms enough to melt chocolate chips.  The end result was a chocolate dough and a taste not quite what I wanted.  I am hoping that my non-experimental apple pie turned out better.  We will see tomorrow when we cut into it.

So sad, so sad!  I just finished off the last morsel of Chocolate Charlie, a delectable chocolate/marshmallow/peanut treat made exclusively in South Bend, Indiana.  Mom gave me a box when I was visiting her last weekend.  It reminds me of one of my favorite cookies, the Mallomar, a cookie with a graham cracker base, filled with marshmallow and covered with chocolate.  When it was first developed, the Mallomar could only be made during the cool months of the year because it would melt during transportation and on the store shelves in the warmer months.  However, even after the invention of refrigeration for storage and transport and the climate control in stores, the makers of this delightful treat decided to continue the tradition of making it exclusively between September and March.  The marketing ploy works to perfection.  The cookie routinely sells out as addicted fans horde it away in their freezers for the lean months.  So check your grocer’s shelves, the Mallomar will only be on them a few short months.  That is the way of what people see as valuable, they seek it when they can and guard it away carefully when it is not readily available.  Hum, I see a spiritual principle here…