Sweet stuff

They're one of the unlikelier staples of the Yuletide season: Harry and David, the Medford, Ore.-based purveyors of mail-order fruit. We received boxes of Harry and David pears from two different sources this Christmas, and these are some discomfitingly wonderful pears. I just had one so juicy that I ate it over the kitchen sink.

But I confess that until lately, I found the concept odd. Mail-order fruit?

This year was different, though, because I was inundated as never before by holiday snacks, most of them unhealthy. Between work and home, this holidays I ate cookies, brownies, fudge, walnut clusters, fancy boxed candy and chocolate-covered pretzels, among other things, and that's not even counting what I ate at the parties.

And so it was amid this deluge of chocolate that the Harry and David gift boxes made all kinds of sense: sweet Jesus, fresh fruit! I think those pears are the only produce I ate between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.