Now that we’re well into December, my body seems to have almost subconsciously gotten permission to want to celebrate. It feels like someone’s injected a craving for peppermint into my veins. And not just peppermint—every shade and variation of seasonal varieties of holiday flavors. Gingerbread and hot cocoa and eggnog spice, pumpkin pie and cinnamon and roasted chestnut. 

Put candy cane labels onto a box of meringues, and I’ll put the box into my shopping cart. If I see an advertisement for special seasonal ice cream flavors at Salt and Straw, the next time I’ve made it to the doors of its fine establishment, my first instinct is to ask and try every new addition.

Yes, I know this is exactly what advertisers want. With profit margins as their end goal, when I, the consumer, associate products with the warm and cozy feeling of the holidays, it’s the corporate bottom line that wins. But isn’t holiday spirit, that mysterious and beautiful intangibility, involved too?

One recent example of this happened when I found myself buying store-bought gingerbread cookie mix, even though I’ve always hated pre-made baking mixes because they’re not spicy enough. I want my gingerbread well-seasoned—I want the walls of my kitchen singed with allspice and cinnamon and clove. 

Still, I reasoned to myself, maybe this one box would be different. The packaging promised a delectable culinary experience. I could almost envision the gingerbread houses I would soon be making. And if nothing else, wasn’t I getting to participate in the vaunted tradition of Christmas baking? At the very least, I consoled myself, I would have crunchy, crispy, gingery biscuits, and a fun memory to boot. 

It was not to be. After bringing the box mix to a friend’s house, and failing miserably to follow the recipe—we swapped ounces of water for cups, and didn’t have any unsalted butter to use—I found myself munching on the most god-awful gingery bread I’d ever had in my entire life. And yet, I was enjoying it. The ordeal, rather than dampening my holiday spirit, had facilitated it further. As we cleaned up the kitchen, we joked to each other that we’d have to make it a tradition—next year, we vowed, if all of us were back in town during the same time, we’d do the same thing, with the same recipe, and the same $2.79 cookie mix. Capitalism, or Christmas spirit, it seemed, had won again.