Firstly, I don’t have any bad habits.  Well, maybe one or two, but I’n not telling you what they are.  Lots of other people I know have them.  My sister, for instance, tells everyone I am mean to her and try to embarrass her all the time.  I do, but she shouldn’t be telling people.  But harassing your sister isn’t a bad habit, it’s just part of being a good brother, right?  If I did have a bad habit, though, it would be candy.  I love the holidays.  You get to make fudge and seven layer cookies and sugar cookies with more icing than cookies and Chex mix and fudge and buy those big boxes of shortbread cookies from Publix and make fudge.  I could go on, but you kinda get the picture.

Not this year.  I have to mitigate my love of all things sweet with the fact that I can’t seem to get my blood sugar down far enough long enough to relax and have a piece of fudge.  My Granny always told to watch how much sugar I ate.  She always said that I’d get sugar from eating sugar.  By “sugar”, she meant diabetes.  I laughed at her.  Eating too much sugar doesn’t cause diabetes.  Guess I was partly wrong.  My sugar eating ways may not have made me at risk, but now I shouldn’t eat candy or cakes or cookies or pecan pie or…well, anything fun.

Christmas started out being a celebration of the birth of Baby Jesus.  Now it is about how much sugar we can consume and how much alcohol we can drink.  Okay, I’ll take back what I said about alcohol, a man needs some vices in his life.  I remember every Christmas when I was little we would get a 100 pound* box of Brock’s candy from my Granny.  When you are a kid, any kind of candy is good candy.  Even the 100 pound box of Brock’s mixed candy in a 10 by 15 foot box.There were all sorts of great flavors in the big box of chocolates.  There was red flavor and green flavor and yellow flavor and two or three kinds of white flavor, every flavor imaginable, except maybe real chocolate.  At least, that is how I remember it.  Even though the quality of the candy was not Lindt Truffles, it was candy.  We ate it all!  What we three boys did’t eat, we gave to my sister.  Funny thing:  most of her pieces had little bites out them.

I will probably have a nibble or a taste of whatever it is my daughter has at her house, but no more binge eating the Russell Stover dark chocolate collection or having 3 pieces of pie after Christmas dinner.  I will lose some of my bad eating habits and hopefully keep my “sugar” under control, but I will still have those fond memories of sugar cookies and candy ribbons and those big chocolate drops and..wait I gotta go check my blood sugar, I think it spiked just thinking about all that.  See y’all on Monday.

* In the interest of truthfulness, the box was probably only 5 pounds.