YOUR Crazy Mother …

The House of Ding Dongs.

It is really, really nice for a child to come home after an arduous day in the classroom and on the playground to find a pleasant treat waiting for them. It might be as simple as a cookie or something more elaborate – maybe even, if you’re lucky, a high-​​fructose-​​corn-​​syrupy, triglyceride-​​laced, machine-​​made marvel from the Hostess Cakes Company. While I’ve never been a fan of their flagship product, the quintessential processed food, the Twinkie, some of their other confections remain to this day a guilty pleasure. I remain a closeted Hostess Cupcake fan, and their fruit pies continue to be a delightful way to shorten your life. These feelings of embarrassed love do not, however, extend to their whimsically named Ding Dongs — a name that is oh so ironic given the circumstances of their fall from my grace.

A photo taken at that time by the Salt Lake Tribune for a story they wrote about Myrna’s remarkable recovery from her car/​train accident.

Myrna may be many things, but at the least, she is a doting mother. She revels in making people happy and this extends doubly so to her darling children (yes, I’m one of those “darlings” though the picture above clearly hints to my early-​​found black-​​sheepish dark side). She would always strive to have a little something for us when we got home from school. For the most part, this was a wonderful thing. There’s a little catch here though. I suppose the appropriate bit of folk wisdom is: be careful what you wish for, you might get it. On one of her expeditions to the grocery store she came across the obscenely garish Hostess confection section, a wonderland of American baking ingenuity, and decided to splurge.

At first, it started with the somewhat traditional fruit pies, but those almost plausibly made-​​by-​​a-​​human-​​hand sugary-​​cardboardy envelopes of almost plausibly healthy fruit sit atop a slippery, slippery slope. Thus Myrna began her slide into modern, industrial strength child pleasing. It did not take long before she moved from the gateway drug of the fruit pies to the slightly more hardcore cupcakes. Again, they were almost like something you might make at home, but with that cunningly clever injection of creamy foamy filling and those enchantingly regular spirals of white on devilishly dark frosting. Myrna was hooked (and so was I.) After a brief unsuccessful dalliance with the evil Twinkie, we hit the mainline — the Ding Dong.

These hockey pucks of chocolaty love hit the spot. They were oh so convenient; they were oh so tasty. At that time (about an eon ago) the Ding Dong was wrapped in an almost delicate foil, which I believe has been ditched for some reason — a shame really. For those of you that live in a cave on another planet, I found a little gem of marketing hyperbole that might be in line. This little blurb comes from the Hostess site (I can almost see the takedown order now). I could not possibly describe them better myself (whoever wrote this deserves a Pulitzer or a bullet in the brainpan, you decide):

Hostess® Ding Dongs®

Ding Dongs — enrobed with chocolate coating, with rich and majestic crème filling, you can’t help but feel like royalty when you bite into one. In fact, when they were first introduced, they were actually called King Dons in some parts of the country […] The name Ding Dong came from the chiming bells used in Hostess’ first television commercials and you’ll be singing a happy tune every time you polish off a package.  Nibble them slowly, like a king or queen, and savor the creamy goodness of every morsel, or bite right into that creamy center and get a mouthful of chocolate goodness.

A mouthful of chocolate goodness indeed, these became a quick favorite. Myrna, being the ever-​​watchful keeper of the pantry, noticed the disappearing Ding Dongs. She also astutely determined the rate of disappearance, and somewhere in that brain of hers, the calculus of consumption versus replenishment came to the conclusion that Ding Dongs were our favorite treat. At first blush, this is all good and fine. There is a dark side though. Myrna tends to fixate and fixate hard. If something works, even marginally, she is likely to follow that pattern, to the exclusion of others, come Hell or high water. The idea of variety being the spice of life is quite alien to her. In Myrna’s world, variety is a spice, but one that is just too hot for her palette and therefore to be religiously avoided. And so the tyranny of “King Don” began.

Even a benevolent king is still a tyrant.

As the Ding Dong neural receptors became saturated in my sister’s and my head, the demographics of the giant cookie jar of treats started to skew toward the foil-​​wrapped population. In a rude gesture to Darwin, the Ding Dong became the dominant species — and why not, it survived where others perished. The jar soon was nothing but Ding Dongs. We still ate them begrudgingly, but the law of supply and demand had been turned on its head by Myrna’s mania. What to do? What to do?

Come to find out, there are many things you can do with Ding Dongs aside from the obvious. First of all, you can give them to your friends. This went over well for a while, but even with more receptors to saturate there come a point where that saturation is reached. This took only about a week surprisingly. Despite our best efforts to redistribute our bounty, the jar remained full. I then discovered a horrible secret in the storage room. There were vast reserves of our now least favorite gastronomical diversion — boxes and boxes of them. We were in crisis.

Necessity is the mother of invention it is said and so we invented. Ding Dongs started their secondary purposing humbly. You can throw them at your friends. They explode in a gentle thud expelling pretty metallic shrapnel covered in brown and white goo. You can roll them down the street (not a high point in our creativity, I’ll admit.) You can make wheels out of them for strange little cardboard cars. You can build a small fort out of them. You can feed them to ants (which apparently lack the Ding Dong receptor and never seem to tire of them, but a single Ding Dong feeds a whole lot of ants, not very efficient…) You can bury them (I expect the insect overloads that replace us will find that a bizarre day at the archeological dig). You can hang them from trees like a strange Christmas ornament. And, last, but not least, you can capitalize on their form factor and use them as hockey pucks, again, with the thud, shrapnel, goo side benefit.

This all went on for an embarrassingly long time — several months I believe.  And then, just as it had started, it stopped. A cog somewhere in mom’s head turned and the Ding Dong was banished. She then started a new search, but never with as lasting a success as the aforementioned. That is not to say that she does not still do the same thing and, for that matter, that there are not still remnants of her attempts to appease us with sugar. She always has a bowl of candy on the counter. No one eats it. She changes the contents about three times a year. She has cookies stashed around the house like an alcoholic stashes pints of vodka. When asked what my sister would like from the store on one of her visits home, she made the unfortunate request for some trail mix to take with her on a hike. So… guess what… we have FOUR kinds of trail mix always present in sealable bags on the counter ready for the taking. There also is a jar of mixed nuts, ALWAYS. Myrna does not eat the trail mix, she does not eat the nuts, but they occupy a piece of premium real estate in the kitchen at the ready twenty-​​four hours a day.

In keeping with the theme of this post, I cannot help but giggle — we were the house of Ding Dongs, and now, we’re the house of mixed nuts.