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A few days before Christmas, 1990, the UPS man brought a nice big box to
my door. Inside was a huge cellophane-wrapped red wicker basket stuffed
with penny candy — pounds and pounds of teeth-rotting Atomic
Fireballs, Sugar Babies, Dum-Dums, Goobers, Bazooka bubblegum, Dots, even
those little pastel globs of sugar that you have to pry off the strips of
paper. It was the most unexpected, indulgent and thoroughly useless present
of my adult life. It was awesome.
Before Candy Basket, I was too much of a shopping purist to even
consider sending someone a gift basket from a holiday food catalog. But,
now, I was intrigued. The next Christmas, armed with a stack of catalogs
ordered from a New Yorker advertising insert, I set out to make friends and
loved ones as happy as Candy Basket had made me — to give the gift of
gluttony to one and all, without even having to leave the couch. And I was
surprised and delighted to find that the more food gifts you give, the more
food gifts you receive, because now all of your friends and loved ones are
on the mailing lists of the catalog companies and the food baskets start
criss-crossing the country, and this goes on and on, back and forth,
Christmas after Christmas until, finally, somebody has the good sense to
say, "Stop it — please."
This moment of sensibility came, for me, last Christmas, as my family of
three was gnawing on a hard block of solid chocolate roughly the size of an
atlas. It suddenly occurred to me that there was no way we were ever going
to eat this thing and, besides, it was growing less and less appetizing
with each little bite we managed to shave off with our front teeth. I never
thought I'd confess this, but here goes: I threw it away. Yes, I threw away
chocolate, and that's madness, I know, but this is what the gift of food
does to you. The gift of food is the embodiment of the adage, "Be careful
what you wish for." It makes you acutely aware of the true meaning of
excess.
And excess, borne of holiday gift-giving self-doubt, is what the food
catalogs are all about. Opening the annual Christmas catalog from Harry
and David, the venerable Oregon purveyors of mail-order fruit and gift
foods, is like stumbling upon a Fellini-meets-Freud fantasia. Halved pears
recline saucily on a bed of glistening cherries; raspberry cheesecakes with
one slice missing open their secret selves to the camera; phrases like
"lush juiciness," "sultry charisma" and "sensuous, sweet and seedless, too"
abound. And, on every page, size matters.
Next: "Five boxes of bliss" and other sugary temptations from Hell
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