It takes mental fortitude — steel in your boots, ice water in your veins, the courage of 18 lions — to do what I did.
There was a half-eaten box of chocolate turtles sitting on the kitchen counter. It was like a drug pusher trying to lull me in every time I walked by: “Hey buddy, you looking for chocolate bliss? Why don’t you come over here. This’ll make you fly.”
Oh, OK. Maybe just 14.
When I caught myself in a staring contest with the box — tears running down my face as I begged for it to release its demonic hold — I finally realized what had to be done.
An old fashioned exorcism.
“Demon be gone!” I hollered before launching the box into the garbage can. I heard groans and strange gurgles coming from the receptacle. All day I fought the temptation to sneak back into the kitchen and pluck out the delectable denizens of hell.
Yes, so powerful was its grasp that I almost resorted to eating garbage. Coffee grounds and discarded turkey bits? I would dig through it for you, my sweet chocolate.
That’s the holidays for you. When we’re all consumed by … well … our own consumption. Our bad eating habits and all that we devour. We finally reach a point where we have to sweep it all into the garbage just to break its spell over us. Else, we’re doomed.
The shame is I’m really a healthy eater the rest of the year. We don’t usually have a lot of sweets, candy or other things that go bump in your arteries around. Which is maybe why when they come around Christmas it becomes too much to bear. I break down and find myself grazing like a cow — lazily munching on big clumps of chocolate and cookies and fudge and peanut brittle. Oh, the peanut brittle! How I love the peanut brittle.
There’s so much temptation. My father bought my brother and I each a box of double-decker MoonPies — the “value pack,” as the box proclaimed.
I think he said he found them at the Tractor Supply store in Tampa and thought they would make a good joke gift. (One year he bought us a case of military rations, and next year I suspect it will be bacon grease and maple syrup in syringes so we can shoot it straight into our veins.)
I haven’t had a MoonPie in years, and a bite or two in I realized why. I don’t drink RC Cola and I don’t like my teeth rotting out like decaying tree trunks while I chew.
“Do you realize,” I told the assembled as I read the ingredients on the box while we munched, “there are three kinds of sugar in these things: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup and sugar?!?”
I’ve been giving them away ever since.
I want it all gone. I want to get back to my regular running routine — the one where I don’t need a crutch with a wheel on it to carry my belly. I want regular meals — the kind with salads, vegetables, small portions and sides that don’t include pecan pie.
I want to be free of the leftover birthday cake from my daughter’s party. We’ve been eating it morning, noon and night, and it still takes up as much room in the fridge as a 20-pound turkey.
“Is it growing in the middle of the night!” I shout in the morning when I find it’s taken over another shelf. “We’re gonna’ have to burn it.”
We’re down to the final pieces, which we’ll eat like all leftovers, in sandwiches with mayo and a slice of lettuce.
Then I think we’ll be free of it. Free of it all. Finally done with the holiday treats and sweets and other holiday delights that have strained our waist lines and carved holes the size of mountain tunnels through our teeth. The exorcism of the holiday junk food will be complete.
A dry house might be a shock to our systems. No doubt we’ll have withdrawals — already I caught myself late one night staring longingly at a bowl of sugar. But we’re strong people with a lot of mental fortitude and too few notches left on our belts.
Now, if only I can just unload those final MoonPies.