Why do I do it?  I know that food is my mortal enemy and I have few weapons against it.  Each year I say that it will be different.  I will turn down all invitations to festivities, I will not so much as make sugar cookie dough, and I won't buy any Halloween candy.  I will hand out dried fruit packets or sugarless gum.  I will turn down all requests from relatives and friends for me to make baked goods and candies.  I will no more make Alabama pound cake, buttermilk fudge, or Texas sheet cake so rich that I have to drink a glass of milk and a full glass of water after eating a piece.  Yet each year when the children and grandchildren return, I roll out the gingerbread, pull out the candy thermometer, and find my mother's old jelly roll pan and begin the process of celebrating the receding of the light and the gathering of the dark into the winter's sleep.  It is a ritual from our deep past; old as the earth itself.  In my family these eating events of the holiday season hark back to the Celtic calendar of old Samhain, (Halloween), and then alter Slaghtmaand (from Old Dutch) that came in November and was the old death when animals we picked for slaughter, or deemed hardy enough to make it through the long winter and were nurtured until  spring.    Winters were hard and animals and people needed fat on them to survive.  We don't need that fat anymore.  When it is cold we just turn up the heat in our houses and cars.  We put on our down jackets, and thinsulate gloves to run from the house to the car.  When the days get shorter we just turn on the lights early.  Changes in the seasons affect us very little or at all.  Still, we eat, and drink and celebrate as we once did. 

The food my family craves during these winter months are the foods of our recent pasts—the food or our childhoods.  My children and siblings want the foods they remember as children as it was prepared in my mother and grandmothers overheated kitchens.  They want homemade fudge, sticky toffee, peanut brittle that could break a tooth, and noodles; handmade, lump, and unevenly cut.  We want our youth back.  We want our mothers, and grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, and all of our relatives who were there when we were growing up.    My candy apples and caramel corn balls will never been as good as my grandmother's, nor my egg nog as fine as my great grandfather's, but each year we resurrect the old recipes, and for a moment, resurrect the dead, or at least the memories of those who have left us.  At the last meal of the holiday season, we raise a glass to those who have passed, those who are present, and to those yet to come.