Toast for Every Holiday
Every holiday has its traditions: its songs, its decorations, its special foods prepared with love and eaten with opinions. Toast has been unjustly excluded from all of them. This guide corrects that oversight, holiday by holiday, with the solemnity each occasion deserves.
Valentine's Day: the heart slice
Cut a sandwich slice into a heart with a cookie cutter or a steady hand and an unsteady plan. Spread it with strawberry jam, because the color is the whole argument. Present it to your beloved with a straight face and the words, "I made you a heart out of toast." If they laugh, the relationship is sound. If they cry, the toast is probably still fine — eat it while they compose themselves.
Easter: the bunny
The Easter bunny is, per our earlier field research, the boss fight of toast animals — but Easter is its natural habitat, and the occasion demands the attempt. Round body, crust ears, marshmallow tail. Hide small toast bunnies around the house for a toast hunt. The children will be confused. Confusion is a traditional Easter emotion.
Halloween: the ghost
The ghost is the easiest holiday toast ever conceived: a pale, lightly toasted slice with two raisin eyes and a raisin mouth, arranged in an expression of mild surprise. It is spooky in the way a sock puppet is spooky — technically, if you commit to it. For advanced hauntings, drape the ghost in a thin sheet of cream cheese and let one corner droop. Atmosphere is everything.
Thanksgiving: the cornucopia problem
Thanksgiving demands abundance, and toast can deliver it: a full platter of varied slices — white, wheat, rye, sourdough — arranged in a horn-of-plenty formation spilling across the table. This is the one holiday where the toast is allowed to simply be toast, because Thanksgiving already has enough performance pressure without the bread also needing a costume.
Christmas: the tree
The Christmas tree is the crown jewel of holiday toast. Stack triangular toast pieces — cut from large slices — in decreasing sizes, spread with a thin layer of green-tinted cream cheese, and decorate with pomegranate seeds as ornaments and a star cut from cheese on top. It will lean. All toast trees lean. The leaning is traditional; the great firs of the forest also lean, and nobody writes articles about it.
New Year's Eve: the countdown stack
Ring in the new year with a tower of ten slices, one for each second of the countdown. At midnight, the tower is demolished ceremonially, one slice per reveler. It is the only New Year's tradition that improves with butter, which is to say it is the best New Year's tradition.
The birthdays, anniversaries, and ordinary Tuesdays
The lesser holidays deserve toast too. A birthday calls for a toast cake: stacked slices with jam between the layers and a single candle on top, presented with full singing. An anniversary calls for two heart slices, side by side, because subtlety is for people who didn't bring toast. And the ordinary Tuesday — the most underrated holiday of all — calls for whatever toast you feel like making, because Tuesday never gets anything and it is tired of being overlooked.
A sincere note
We have been joking for five articles now, so here is the true part: making silly food with people you love is one of the great quiet joys available to a human being. It costs almost nothing. It takes twenty minutes. The kitchen gets messy, the toast looks ridiculous, somebody laughs with jam on their face, and for a little while the day is better than it was. The toast is not the point. The mess is not the point. Doing something pointless and joyful together, on purpose — that is the whole point, and it has been all along.