Chocolate, Chocolate, chocolate. . .but is there more?

I love chocolate. I really do. A homemade chocolate cake with chocolate icing is probably my favorite cake, with only chocolate-chip pound cake coming close. I love cooked chocolate pudding and canned chocolate pudding on a buffet at my favorite Chinese restaurant (but not instant pudding, mind you . . . so unsatisfying). I like chocolate fondue and cookies that prominently feature chocolate chips with cranberries or pretzels or anything really. I’m really am like Cathy from the Sunday comics.

I like chocolate a lot. But still every once and a while, I get to thinking, what other dessert flavors are out there? And should I branch out a little?

I am a bit of a baker, so every now and again, I challenge myself to make a dessert that doesn’t include chocolate. For example, earlier this week I made two apple pies. I found the recipe in the Bon Appetit cookbook that my parents got me for Christmas about ten years ago. I am going toot my own horn a little bit and say that they were very well received at Thanksgiving dinner. That is to say, the pie I made got eaten, with relish. But also important, I really enjoyed eating it

My mother was always a pie maker, but as a child I never really liked pie, so I didn’t eat very many slices when I was a kid. She even made the crust from scratch. I always thought that pie crust wasn’t delicious unless it was graham cracker crust and I never found the pie filling to be as sweet and delicious as cookies and cake. I wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate her pie, I just didn’t really care for pie as general rule. Perhaps as a tribute to her, last year, for the first Thanksgiving after she died, I made my first blueberry pie. That is when I decided to soften my stance on pies that come in traditional pie crust. I realized that pie is actually pretty good.

Truthfully, that sounds like a classic Katie-thing. I often don’t really like things in general unless they are my idea, including the things that I like to eat. I have to come to them on my own.

While I love chocolate, I am beginning to appreciate non-chocolate desserts. This has been a development over the last five years or so. Someday, when I feel like spending some money, I will buy a vanilla bean or a bag of them or a some cardamom and make chai flavored desserts. Until then I have some great baking cookbook so I can make new things when I am feeling adventurous.

I bring this up because we are about enter the chocolate season. Everything between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is chocolate covered both literally and metaphorically. Gatherings, desserts, outings are all decadent-to-the-max. This is the time of the year to wear your best clothes. Your most sequence covered attire (if you own any). It is the season of exuberance and excitement, or twinkling lights and decorated Christmas trees. It is a season of butter and rich flavors. It is a season of days and days of gatherings and traveling. It is the season of croquembouche, if you are so lucky.

Sometimes more subtle emotions and flavors get lost in the holiday season. Sometimes the holidays get tense and testy along with the exuberance and excitement.

My holiday this year has not been testy or tense but it hasn’t been rousing or exhilarating either. I won’t describe the way I feel as unhappy. And while I had a great childhood and I have many fond memories of Thanksgivings past, I am not currently especially wistful or nostalgic right now for my childhood holidays past.

My holiday has been pleasant and polite, friendly with few late nights except when the time we accidentally stayed downstairs after 11 pm watching Netflix.

These last few days, I have been asking my husband if I am going through a mid-life crisis because I haven’t been that excited about the holidays.

However, when I googled mid-life crisis, it didn’t really describe what I was feeling. Apparently, people going through a mid-life crisis feel like they need to do something rash to change their life radically. They have a crisis in confidence and identity.

I don’t really feel differently about my identity and I am not having a crisis in confidence.

If I had to describe it, I guess I would say that I felt the holidays to be surprising and exciting when I was younger and I just don’t feel that anymore. I am not sad about the holidays, just not exuberant.

I told this to my husband and he told me that perhaps what I am feeling is that we are in the point in our lives where we are in the middle of the happiness curve. I googled happiness curve and found that this phenomenon has been studied by lots of social scientists and it appears that for many people happiness is kind of a U shaped curve. People are happier as children, teens, and young adults. Happiness takes a dip in the 30’s, 40’s, and goes up again after 50. There is a whole book about it called, are you ready for this, “The Happiness Curve” by Jonathan Rauch.

Here’s a graph I found in google images to illustrate the happiness curve.

When I first saw this graph, it bummed me out a little because I am only 40. That seems like only the beginning of the trough. I might be in the middle part of the U for a while, I thought.

I learned from reading that after 50 life starts to get happier again because you find happiness in your children and the people around you and their accomplishments and happiness. I do derive some excitement about the holidays from my four year old son and his younger brother, but I also can’t help but to feel the weight of the pressure of being the elf that makes all the Christmas magic possible.

For example, much of the fours year old’s excitement is centered around toys he hopes to get or activities I will need to assist very heavily on like gingerbread house making.

Additionally, he has wanted me to put the Christmas tree up since mid-November. When we drive past stores with Christmas decorations in their windows or outside their buildings, he cajoles we about when are we going to put up our tree. The truth is, I don’t think out tree will last one day in our house with him and his 21 month old brother. I think that tree will be on the floor in a matter of hours. I was kind of hoping to put it up no earlier than December 20th.

Not to be a Grinch, but some aspects of Christmas can be kind of a drag.

But then I remembered that I need to redefine the way I was defining happiness about the holidays, which is to say exuberance and pure excitement is only one emotion. There are a whole palate of emotions that can be satisfying in their own way. Just as chocolate isn’t the only substance of dessert, my youthful feelings about the holidays might only be a rough cut of what the holidays are all about. Just as there are a lots dessert flavors and techniques to sample the world is rich tapestry of emotions and experiences. I need to open my mind and not get sucked into what I think I should be feeling at the holidays.

Plus, I know there will be some cute memories along the way. I am really looking forward to meeting up with some friends who also have small children to go the Camden, New Jersey Aquarium to see Santa scuba diving around a Christmas tree in huge aquarium. There are new memories and traditions to make. Perhaps will learn to appreciate gratitude the lemon cake of holiday emotions.

How are you doing with the holidays?