The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

He’d be like, “We ate an hour ago. It’s time to eat again. Where are the candied nuts?”

I’d be like, “Jesus, your pants are starting to look a little tight around the hips.”

“Shh,” he’d say. “We’ll talk about it after New Year’s. I’m going to buy a gym membership on the 2nd after I’m done purging.”

I’d put my eggnog down and hoist myself up from the couch long enough to see Jesus sneaking more molasses cookies in the kitchen. “But Jesus,” I’d say, “you are going to fall into a sugar coma.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he’d say. “Give me some more of your honey baked ham.”

The time has come to plan my (and that other guy’s) holiday party! I have a few preliminary ideas for entertainment:

1) Famous local musicians will lead my guests in a Christmas carol sing-a-long. I will pay them in merriment.

2) The two principals of the Charlottesville Womens’ Arm Wrestling League will give a pre-season exhibition.

3) We will paint cookies with dyed confectioner’s sugar that will not be tainted with lead.

4) Someone will dress up like Santa Claus and promise your children expensive gifts.

I need to choose a date. Saturday night the 15th of December? Thoughts?

PS The Christmas tree is dead and won’t be accepting presents this year, but I will.

If you go trick or treating in Lovingston, Virginia, you can expect to see:

1) historic houses with haunted front yards bombed with synthetic spiderwebs;

2) goth teenagers in extra-wide, circa 1996 skateboard pants;

3) a piglet in a tiger cub costume (and some other people);

4) a coven of six-year-old Disney princesses holding hands, clotheslining other children on their way to the candy;

5) preternaturally smiley and generous people handing out neon glow sticks and Ziplock bags stuffed full of Sweet Tarts, Whoppers, and Sprees. They were positioned on both sides of the Lovingston main street, doling out their goods not from a front porch, but from giant garbage bags on the sidewalk. “Those people are awesome,” I said. “They gave me my own glow bracelet. It’s pink.” “Seems suspicious,” said Darren. Then I reached into my candy sack and found a religious pamphlet published by Billy Graham and company. On the cover were cute cartoon kids dressed in Halloween costumes. They were walking up a shining path lit by pumpkins with trick or treat bags in their hands. At the end of the path was a gold mansion where God lived. Apparently God gives out the best candy.

I had to eat so much chocolate! Since I haven’t been drinking lately, the calories have to come from somewhere. Tonight I started with See’s. Then I moved onto Gearheart’s. Then my dad went out to the trunk of his car and came back to the kitchen table with a dish of chocolate bars arranged like flowers, a Boss’s Day gift from the nurses at his office.

I’ve seen a lot of bouquets in my life. I’ve seen them made from fruit. I’ve seen them made from flowers, both paper and plastic. I have eaten lollipop roses. But I had never seen a candy bouquet before tonight. These craft-store-happy entrepreneurs took a glue gun and attached dozens of fun-sized Snickers and Baby Ruth bars to sharpened sticks. Then they used the sticks to impale a crusty piece of green styrofoam lodged in a cat’s water bowl.  The resulting bouquet is like peering deep into a bottomless bag of Halloween candy from the rich peoples’ neighborhood, i.e. peering deep into heaven. It looks like you’ll never make it to the bottom of the chocolate, but then the thing topples and almost stabs you in the neck while you’re battling the styrofoam for the last KitKat. And you discover that the middle of the bouquet is stuffed with tissue paper colored like plastic wrappers for camouflage. And when the candy is gone you are left with a bunch of sharp sticks with trash stuck to them. What then? Toss them on the grill like garbage kebabs?

I am going to get a raging case of diabetes.

Gentlemen, please take note.  Send me expensive chocolates and flowers separately. Unless you can figure out how to make live daisies taste like ice cream (Lynsie, I am putting you on the case here), I’d like my bouquets sans plastic wrap and high fructose corn syrup.