My Kingdom For A Ding Dong

If my addition is right, and it rarely is, this year marked the 9th annual Oscars Party with our friends the Kelly’s. It began when our children were all young and we were at the beach house we would eventually come to own together. In order to have the kids involved we came up with awards everyone could participate in.

The first year I think we made our homemade “Oscars” out of some sort of cookie. The second year we discovered that a Ding Dong with a HoHo glued on top with melted chocolate gave an acceptable rendition of an Oscars statue. I believe it was Alex Kelly who originally dubbed them the DingHo Awards.

Every year we get together at the Kelly’s house. Melissa is an excellent cook and I think it pleases her to plan the menu. Each Best Picture nominee has some sort of nod to it. The food is always delicious.

Through the years our attendees have waxed and waned. Three of our five kids are out of the house, boyfriends and girlfriends have been known to wander through the ranks. This year all four Kelly kids were in attendance while the Young family came in with only two. I suspect we were all there in spirit.

While Melissa has always been in charge of the meal, the DingHo Awards fell within my jurisdiction. It is fair to say that Melissa has the lion’s share of the responsibility since through most of the years I’ve purchased the supplies and pawned off the actual award production to first Zoe and Dillon and more recently to Max and Katie.

When the announcement of the demise of Hostess came to our attention, I know I speak not only for myself, but for others in the group as well when I say that or first thought was, “But what about the DingHo awards?”

In our hearts we never truly believed that such an important American icon could ever, would ever, be allowed to be dissolved. Indeed, I still wonder when someone brave, and wise, a sort of snack-cake super hero, will arise and take up the Twinkie banner.

Until such a one emerges, we have been left to our own devices. We will have to pinch hit.

This year I found a recipe for the Samoa Girl Scout cookie. I made it into a gluten free affair and topped it with a Little Debbie’s Boston Cream roll up thingy. The verdict? Well, the cookies were delicious but LD uses too much sugar in my opinion, and of course we added milk chocolate and M&M’s to the mix, so that’s gonna make your teeth ache for sure.

My expectation is that we’re going to have to continue to tweak the recipe until we find a suitable solution. Or maybe we’ll make it up every year.

It has been my experience that the things we thought were forever and for sure, never are, even Ding Dongs, HoHos & Twinkies. What’s the saying about death and taxes? They’re the only two things that are certain.

But uncertainty isn’t all that bad after all. It gives us the opportunity to show our stuff, the stage on which to bring out all our best ingenuity and shine. I’m already pondering how to make the awards even better for next year. Life is so much more interesting when we don’t know what’s coming up next.