With the red cup crisis of 2015 passed, a true Christmas catastrophe yet looms: Time-honored tastes from Christmases past are in danger of extinction, forever lost from the hors d’oeuvres plates and family feasts of future generations.

The list of most-endangered holiday-time flavors?:

1) Eggnog: This spicy beverage blend of egg, cream, sugar, egg, cream, sugar and spices perhaps took its fatal blow in the health-crazed ’80s, when cholesterol was enemy No. 1. Today, we have Islamic terrorists and/or climate change for that.

Yet, the sumptuous, frothy glass of eggnog never made its comeback — even though vinyl records have. Spiked or straight, and even removing the egg and most of the nog from modern blends (whatever nog is, we don’t want to know), eggnog to this day remains at high risk.

2) Cranberry sauce: A longtime staple of Thanksgiving and Christmas alike, this dish is too often sacrificed for the latest feast fad.  Maligned as neither a dessert nor a savory side, it’s nonetheless an essential flavor for tying together all others in sweet-and-sour harmony: turkey, stuffing, and potatoes and gravy, all on a fork with cranberries at the same time. Yum!

Aggravating its demise is a run on cranberries for other products; similar to ethanol putting a strain on once-abundant corn grain, cran-everything: drinks, teas, candies, lip balms and skin exfoliants — have robbed the dinner table of this once commodious treat.

Culinary historians mark the advent of canned jellied cranberry sauces in the mid-20th-century as the apex — and the beginning of the downfall — of this dish. Perhaps because, when that jellied cylinder is sliced and served, it closely resembles another endangered flavor: Beets

3) Beets: This red-hued holiday dish, best served not at all, could pass into eternity and like the mosquito, would not be missed, but would definitely be noticed. With great cheer.

4) Gingerbread: Long synonymous with Christmas, this treat in recent years has been moved aside to make way for its blander cousin the sugar cookie — the Wonder Bread of Christmas flavors. Even gingerbread houses have been made from grahams for at least a generation.  The deep flavors of molasses and ginger are too strong for today’s pabulum palates.

5) Sugarplums: The original gummy treat, these sweet, fruity, sugar-coated spice drops are the Christmas equivalent of a Werthers from grandma’s purse — too uncool even for the hipsters to adopt. So sad.

6) Nuts: A carved bowl full of in-the-shell peanuts, pecans,  walnuts, hazels and filberts used to be set out shortly after Thanksgiving, alongside the wreath, tree and other Christmas trimmings. These were mostly enjoyed by the menfolk of the house, with kids volunteering to crack the nuts as a sort of off-season firecracker.

My guess is that the labor involved in this treat — once the fun of explosively opening the nutty packaging, you must patiently pick tiny slivers of nutmeat from deep crevices of the shell — brought nuts their due fate. That, and also the pain of finding a shell shrapnel on the floor with a bare foot — a pain similar to, but inconceivably worse than that of stepping on a Lego.

We can’t take any of these treasured tastes for granted; licorice is already extinct. Even peppermint could find its way onto the list, supplanted by more common flavors of chocolate or the novelty of sour gummy worms.

Together, we must stem the tide before it’s too late. Do your part to save — by savoring — these threatened holiday flavors. Lest we forever change the meaning of the season.

Copyright 2015

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Deep Thoughts From the Shallow End of the Pool features essays from PR, business, and life — which means they might be as random as any of the rest of the content on this site!