Regulars(Archives)
Michael Jesso’s Fabulous, Derailed - Christmas Crack is Wack
A disturbing trend making its way around the interwebs this holiday season is the gimmick of calling otherwise delicious holiday treats “Crack”...referencing the highly-addictive street drug to anything quick, easy, and delicious you whipped up at Christmas. A quick Google search produces dozens of recipes from Reindeer Crack to Christmas Crack, all involving enough sugar to put all your friends and family in a coma. While I get the comparison of using the word to describe something you can’t get enough of, and want to keep going back for, we owe it to the little ones to not normalize the word crack.
For starters, Crack is dirty. Crack is a cocaine-based drug that users find themselves addicted to on the first try. Recovered addicts still report waking up every day and craving it years after they stopped using it, and they are the lucky ones. I say lucky because it didn’t kill them. While the death rates of Crack use has always been high, the fentanyl epidemic in the last few years has sent the death rates to epic numbers. In the immortal words of Whitney Houston on her famous interview with Diane Sawyer: Crack is wack.
While it might be funny among the adults who’ve never suffered from a drug addiction to swoon and salivate over the latest concoction of pretzels, Fritos, Bugles, Chex Mix, peanuts and M&M’s all smothered in melted white chocolate, but what do you tell the kids?“ Here honey, have some reindeer crack,” or “ Here, have some slow cooker crack on a bun, now go play with your sister.”
The problem here is we as a society just said yes to Crack. We’ve normalized the word Crack though word association and we’ve made it delicious. On the other side of this, when we tell a child or a early teen that Crack is bad and send them off into the world on their own, their first introduction to Crack was a treat at Christmas, how bad can the stuff Tiegan is selling really be?
Keep “Crack” off the Christmas buffet. It’s as simple as that. The explaining down the road is a recipe for disaster that you set yourself up for when you thought you were using a funny word to describe gluttony. It’s sometimes the little things in life that we don’t think about that really come back to bite us. If you encounter a recipe this season or anytime of the year using the word Crack, change it. Easy peasy lemon breezy.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Holidays to the other 29 major religious holidays we observe this holiday season. Please don’t drink and drive.
