All Mixed Up

You can't make me stop.

I’m well aware that a great many people believe, with an intensity entirely disproportionate to the stakes, that the holiday season should end no later than 11:59 PM Greenwich Mean Time on January 1.

I agree with them—in principle. If the holidays are special to you, you want to retire them while they’re at the top of their game. Like Michael Jordan, the first two times he hung up his own eponymous shoes. And if the holidays are not special for you, you just want to get back to a world without Burl Ives.

But I disagree with them in practice. Because to agree with them in practice would mean putting away the Chex mix.

I frankly don’t understand why Chex mix in a bag at the store is a year-round affair, while homemade Chex mix is a winter staple. Maybe it has to do with the oven being on for an hour a batch. Maybe it has to do with the Worcestershire sauce industry trying to get in on that holiday bump.

Whatever the reason, I make Chex mix the moment I remember it exists in the fall, and I don’t stop making it until even the self-checkout machine raises an eyebrow at anyone buying multiple boxes of perfectly boring cereal when it is clearly cookout season.

I just like it. My dogs like it. My beloved likes it so much that, walking into the house with a batch of fresh Chex mix cooling on the counter, she stuck her face in it.

And I can’t blame her. Once it’s done cooling on the counter, I hoard the Chex mix in the highest cabinets. My grandmother reportedly would make Chex mix weeks, months, before the holidays so it had time to properly age, the magical combination of seasoned salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and butter deepening the flavors and thus the joy of these perfectly bland cereals. She’d stash it atop the fridge and in other high places, out of reach of my grandfather, who was nicknamed “Shorty.”

I wouldn’t know, though. No matter how high up I stash it, my arms are longer than my grandmother’s, and my willpower is shorter than Shorty.

This is not simply an unreasonable craving for whole-grain cereals mixed with peanuts. It is also my easiest way into Responsible Adulthood. I get my annual supply of iron in about a month of committed, mindless snacking on fortified dry goods. And I can impress what friends I have.

“Wait, you can make your own Chex mix?” one such friend asked this last year. (He gets out of the house as much as your average Victorian gothic bride stashed in the attic, probably alongside some well-hidden Chex mix.)

“You can!” I said. “And I would have brought you all some, except my beloved stuck her face in it before it cooled.”

I later took them some of my un-faced Chex mix, which is a great way to earn cheap friend credit, especially when the cereals are so often on sale for like $1.99 a box or a buy-two-get-three-free deal. How am I supposed to not acquire another month’s supply of Chex at those prices? And who cares if I get such joy out of making still more of my own snack foods long after the holidays have perished? I’ll let go when I’m good and ready. Or when I run out of Worcestershire sauce.

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