The Christmas season is always a festive occasion.  Likewise the annual Ludic Log Golden Crap Shack Awards:  when Crappy time rolls around, there’s a little more love in the air, a little more kindness in our hearts, and a little more nausea festering in our guts.  So this year, why not combine the two into one single celebration?  Why not celebrate the birth of Jesus and/or the visitation of Santa Claus by enjoying this look at some of the worst, most misbegotten holiday foodstuffs your local grocery store can possibly provide?  Join me, if you will, and you’ll be jingling all the way to the toilet.

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Here is the proprietary recipe used by the world’s most successful food mavens to lure you into a winter wonderland of Christmas deliciousness.  Don’t tell anyone about this closely guarded industry secret!

1.  Take the stuff you normally sell.

2.  Color it red and green.

Deceptively simple, isn’t it?  And yet how well it works!  How deviously, dastardly well!  But the folks at Kraft Foods didn’t become kings of the processed nutrition delivery market just by following the rules, however cunningly effective those rules may be.  No, it takes a special kind of genius to craft “America’s Favorite Marshmallow”.  And it’s that commitment to taking things one step further, one level higher, that brings us Kraft Jet-Puffed Holiday Mallows.  Not only are they red and green, but they feature “fun” shapes!  Two of them!  The green ones look like Christmas trees, and the red ones look like stars.  It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that America is the envy of all the world.  But wait – wait just a goddamn minute.  Can it be that Kraft went even further than that, in creating the ultimate Christmas-based aeronautically enhanced marshmallow product?  Yes it can!  For you see, these tasty treats forsake the normal burnt-sugar-and-dust flavor of marshmallows for a universally beloved kiss of artificial vanilla!  Kraft has even gone so far as to provide us with some delectable recipes:

Mmmm!  Tempting, isn’t it?  Nothing improves the taste of a gin and tonic like an artificial vanilla-flavored red marshmallow.  But make no mistake:  these aren’t just an adult-beverage option.  They might possibly appeal to slightly dim children as well, and there’s even a website that tells you how to properly supervise your young ones so that they don’t become one of the tens of thousands of marshmallow-related fatalities recorded each Christmas season.  How’s the quality, you ask?  Don’t.  I’d rather eat a locust shell than a marshmallow.  But the presence of tetrasodium pyrophosate (a whipping aid) certainly speaks to vices other than that of the gourmand.

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Apparently, the folksy folks at Pepperidge Farms took a look at how fancy Kraft had gotten with their ritzy mallows and said “fuck it, we ain’t topping that”.  Or the folksy equivalent thereof.  So the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Holiday Crackers make only a token effort at holidization, coloring their festive fish red and green and naught else.  Well, they also put the cartoon fish on the front in a Santa hat, but that just seems sad.  I’m uncomfortable enough at the thought of a cheese-flavored fish without the added incongruity of it wearing a hat and sunglasses.  And what is a goldfish holiday, anyway?  I cannot imagine that it consists, as the package art would have it, of riding around in a sled; “not being eaten” would probably be of a higher priority could the poor creatures express a preference in how to spend their vacations.  This product violates two cardinal rules of non-creepy advertising:  first, do not call attention to your line extension’s sameness (here, a big “SAME GREAT CHEDDAR TASTE” blurb assures you that, despite the colors, you will not be eating fistfuls of cinnamon and mint-flavored goldfish) and do not remind people that they are eating an animal, let alone make the animal complicit in its own slaughter (as in the goldfish cracker’s slogan, “the snack that smiles back”; anyone who has eaten a goldfish tail first can tell you that smiling is simply not in its repertoire at such a dire moment).  Otherwise, there’s nothing to set this dull product apart from any number of other holiday-themed novelty snacks that my local grocery was too lame to carry.

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The band Thin White Rope was named after William Burroughs’ all too memorable conjuration of one of his favorite subjects:  male ejaculate.  So you can imagine my shock and horror when I peeled open a Wonka Nerds Rope and discovered what appeared to be one foot of bloody jism that had become encrusted with Christmas-colored aquarium rocks.  

I apologize for that.  This is a family site, and I know you and your children do not come here to read me compare a fine candied product compared to something that came out of a pee pee.  But let us face facts here:  this product, even leaving aside the name (which conjures terrifying images of lawless vigilantes roaming the land, lynching teenagers who are good at math) is extremely distasteful in literally every way.  The Willie Wonka people are supposed to be candy innovators, but I’m afraid this needs to be placed in the Hall of Failures along with fizzy lifting drinks and that gum that tastes like roast beef.  From what I can tell, it is a stream of dried jelly donut innards upon which “Nerds” – which are petrified sugar globules and not actual nerds – have been allowed to congregate like flies on a glue strip.  Its appearance is repulsive, its taste is rank (the ultra-sweet intensity of the sugar globules is unsuccessfully chased by a jolt of artificial sour at the core of the dried jelly), its concept is baffling, and its Christmas theme is tenuous at best, supported only by the colors and the shoddy last-minute addition of snowflakes and the ubiquitous Santa hats to the labeling.  If Kris Kringle has anything to do with this venomous miscarriage of candy, he is a different man than I was raised to believe.

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Sometimes, a perfectly acceptable foodstuff can be ruined by a poor choice of name.  B&M Beans will forever be a second-rate runner-up to Bush’s, because the latter does not conjure images of a bowel movement; we eat hot dogs at ballgames instead of wieners or frankfurters because we are more comfortable with the idea of putting a boiled canine in our mouth than a penis or a former Supreme Court justice.  Such is certainly the case with Ambrosia Chocolate Flavored Bark Coating, a product of the multifarious minds of the Archer-Daniels-Midland agri-evil conglomerate.  In reality, it is a simple enough item:  robust hunks of “chocolate flavored” sugar and palm oil, each with a heart-surgeon-enriching 14 grams of fat, designed for easy melting and use as a yummy coating for your favorite Christmas cookies, pretzels, strawberries and, er, lollipops, at least according to the label.  But the use of the word “bark” has no doubt driven leery consumers to other brands that do not employ a word that makes you think that using their product will result in fudge with the robust, all-natural taste of elm.  Further complicating matters is the fact that the centerpiece treat on the label is shaped like a tree, no doubt meant to conjure images of a relaxed family Christmas around the ol’ tannenbaum, but more likely to cause in wary shoppers a moment of panic and the internal query “Is…is this made of wood?”  Finally, it’s not even just chocolate bark:  it’s chocolate bark coating, which is all the more confusing and may lead even those who realize that it is in fact chocolate and not wood chips to think that its use is to place a rich candy shell around any wood chips they happen to have.  A noble and probably delicious product (I say probably because I didn’t bother to try any; I make it a point not to eat anything with the size and heft of a gold ingot) doomed by bad naming conventions.

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Eggnog is a longtime dealbreaker at Christmas celebrations, a polarizing beverage option that divides our country along a white-hot fault line no less volatile than the red-state/blue-state divide.  For those who love it, there’s never enough; for those who hate it, its mere presence is an abomination.  I myself am a big fan of the nog; it’s rich, tasty, and goes down smooth with the addition of any bourbon you happen to have lying around that doesn’t have marshmallows floating in it.  I only regret that it isn’t available year-round, and that my own attempts at making it have yielded a frothy, undrinkable concoction that tastes more like something Rocky Balboa would swig before a fight and then vomit up during it than a tasty holiday treat.  As for its detractors, they tend to cite its heaviness and richness (pluses in my book, especially in a dairy item) and claim that it’s “too eggy” – a baffling comment akin to calling a steak “too meaty”, but I am here only to test, not to judge.  

Given this extreme divide of opinion, it should come as no surprise that Parco Foods Holiday Egg Nog Cookies were a hot-button fightstarter among our diverse panel of taste-testers who all happen to be related to me.  Those who liked them were eggnog boosters; those who hated them were eggnog haters.  Resembling a macaroon into which someone has inserted a deviled egg, these globular doohickeys were far and away my favorite item of the Christmas Crappys, but two of our tasters vehemently disagreed, one of them comparing their taste unfavorable to that of puke.  Their texture likewise took a bit of getting used to; they were not cookies as such, but more wafers topped with a somewhat shockingly gooey soufflé of noggy something-or-other at the top.  With the votes evenly split, I’m afraid that I can’t really call this item one way or the other; like the beverage that inspired them, these cookies proved to be the Howard Stern of holiday-themed foodstuffs, inspiring devotion and revulsion but very little in between.

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We, the staff of the Golden Crap Shack Award for Moronic Food Product of the Year Institute, tend to distrust conventional wisdom.  We believe that the Hot Pocket is entirely overrated as a rotten, health-destroying convenience food; we believe that Holiday Spice Pepsi, far from resembling dead leaves, mud, and battery acid, was a delicious and unique soda beverage and would enjoy hearing of its return; and it is daring, not contrarianism, that leads us to claim that Arby’s is not only not the worst fast food restaurants in America, but one of the best.  That is why, when the theme of this year’s Crappys was decided upon, we looked with extreme skepticism upon the nomination of the HEB Bakeries Fruit & Nut Cake.  It didn’t seem likely that fruitcake could be as bad as its reputation; like other things that were the universal butt of jokes – Cleveland, the people of Poland, Paris Hilton – we suspected that fruitcake was mildly unpleasant at worst, possibly even a decent product outpaced by its unpleasant reputation.  Fruitcake was second only to airline food in the repertoire of third-rate comedians, with tales of one eternal fruitcake being passed down from the hands of Cain being in common circulation.  Curiously, we had never actually eaten fruitcake; but, we reasoned, how bad could it be?  Although we aren’t especially fond of cake, this perennial Christmas favorite contains mostly wholesome ingredients like fruit, nuts, eggs and milk, which surely must balance out unidentifiable mutagens like oleoresin turmeric, maltodextrin and sodium prioponate.  It’s universally beloved of grandmas, who seem to have our best interests at heart despite their inexplicable belief that children love ribbon candy.  And it’s frequently served soaked in brandy, and it is close to a truism that anything that can be saturated with liquor can’t be all bad (with the notable exception of Henry Miller).  

Well, we were wrong.  The hands-down winner of the 2006 Crappys, this fruit & nut cake failed in almost every conceivable way:  its taste was awful, as if someone had taken one of those Brach’s fruit nougat candies and rolled it around under the refrigerator for several hours.  Its texture was horse-chokingly bad; from the moment it entered your mouth you felt as if a coroner would soon be removing it from your throat.  Its packaging was dull; its cost was too high; it weighed as much as my car; its crusting of pecans spoke of something that was built to sit on a shelf and gather dust, like an unloved cologne, rather than be eaten; and its odor was, to put it mildly, unwelcoming – grossly evocative of that same dusty unloved cologne.  Its makers, to cap it all off, obviously believed the hype that fruitcakes are meant to be given, not eaten, and as a result crammed it so full of life-extending preservatives that the experience of eating it was much like that of sitting down in front of a plate full of the arm of your couch.  Score one for conventional wisdom; and have a merry Christmas.

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