Pretty Sweet
Look, I have no idea how it is already the first Monday in December. My sense of time is all askew because now that we have two stores, we are so much more balanced in our production that the long days filled with baking from sunup to sundown are much less. We are doing more overall with significantly less chaos. It’s weird. And honestly, the jury is out on how I feel about it because I thrive on chaos. At any rate, I know it wasn’t long ago when December sent us off the rails fairly quickly. Here’s a recap of what we were doing this Monday in previous years:
2021: We were in thick of making 6,000 tarts for the VU Holiday Light Show…and those tarts would eventually all blow away in a massive December thunderstorm that would cancel the light show. VU didn’t choose us to be in the light show this year, probably because we are all still processing the trauma of that night.
2020: It was a pandemic holiday season and our shipping was at an all-time high. I made my annual jar box order from our supplier and her name is Sandy Cheeks. As in the Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob Squarepants, if you aren’t aware. I’m literally the only person that laughs when I think that the real Sandy Cheeks doesn’t know the cartoon Sandy Cheeks is a thing.
2019: We were shipping jars all over the country as gifts from the Telluride Film Festival. Apparently, jars are our thing in December. That said, the last day we can ship with holiday arrival this year is December 19th, so don’t delay.
2018: We were recovering from the time our oven broke on the Sunday of Thanksgiving week. Clearly, it was traumatic because I was still harping on it almost two weeks later. In retrospect, I think I was more traumatized by that experience than pie tornado last year.
2017: Someone arrived to pick up 40 pies except we didn’t have them ready because on the order form someone wrote “Thursday, December 5th” except that year, December 5th was actually on Wednesday. Can we please have a moment for how we’ve grown as a business since those days? Woof.
2016: We replaced our small 1940s refrigerator that merchandised cream pies with our large double door merchandising cooler and freezer that we still have at Nifong. This is the point in our history that when you order large commercial equipment, they will just leave that stuff on the sidewalk and let you figure out how to get it in the storefront. In this case, it took approximately six hours of employee time and was super stressful.
2015: I discussed Patti Labelle’s Sweet Potato pie, which she debuted at Walmart that holiday season. It spiked calls to our store asking if we made Sweet Potato pie. Ironically, last Friday, someone left us a three star Google review because Patti Labelle’s Sweet Potato pie is much cheaper than ours. And when you use machines in large factories in cities far away instead of actual humans baking from scratch, Patti definitely can be cheaper.
2014: We were recovering from our first Thanksgiving, which was an unmitigated disaster. It forever changed me and set my internal barometer to “Is this worse than that first Thanksgiving?”
2013: We were fresh off our 100 pie baking Thanksgiving holiday at the Elks Lodge and we were waiting for The Kroenke Group to send back our lease changes. During this era I dubbed him “Silent Stan” because it took forever. The 2022 version of me now knows that Stan Kroenke has no idea that I - or PJP - exist. But at the time, that he cared about our lease was a charming new entrepreneur sort of vibe that was pretty sweet.