Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [124]
—Of course it’s true that some presents are better to get than others but some are better to give, too.
—Some people are easy to give to, others are hard and there’s always one who’s impossible. Usually it isn’t that the person has everything, it’s that he or she is not enthusiastic about gifts.
—The knowledge that the sales will start the day after Christmas doesn’t deter many people from buying presents before Christmas.
—When you buy a piece of clothing for someone, it’s more apt to be too small than too big. Clothes look bigger on the rack than they do on someone.
—The store clerk who asks, “May I help you with something?” can hardly ever help.
—You read and hear a lot of advice about how to keep your Christmas tree to keep from getting dry so the needles don’t fall off but most Christmas trees are cut in November and nothing anyone does can keep them from drying out and dropping their needles all over your livingroom floor.
— It’s interesting how good orange and black seem for Halloween and how wrong they’d be as Christmas colors.
—In spite of the old sayings to the contrary, the best presents come in large packages.
—A quarter of the Christmas cards we get are from some commercial establishment. There ought to be a law against a company or anyone with whom you have a business arrangement sending you a Christmas card. “Happy Holidays from all of us at the First National Bank” doesn’t make me feel warm all over toward the bank. I don’t want cards from any real estate brokers, dentists, insurance salesmen or car dealers, either. I don’t want a Christmas card from anyone I don’t know personally.
I’d include in this group the President of the United States. When Bill Clinton was President, we used to get two cards from Bill and Hillary, one at home and one at the office.
The Clintons wished us “a beautiful holiday season.” I was flattered and touched until I came to the note in small print on the back of the card that read “PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.” That’s not in the Christmas spirit.
Apparently the Clintons didn’t leave their Christmas card list with the Bushes. We haven’t received one from them.
The More You Eat
What follows is a list of the ten best tastes.
No. 1: SUGAR. This sweetener is at the top of the taste list even though too much of it is cloying and unpleasant. It’s the most important ingredient in many things we eat—even things we don’t consider sweet. When I make bread with six cups of flour I put a full tablespoon of sugar in the flour because of what sugar does for the yeast.
No. 2: SALT. Without salt, anything is tasteless. I like a little too much salt; a tablespoon in the bread.
(Too much sugar or too much salt is bad for us, but one of the things we all recognize is the direct relationship between how good something
The More You Eat 279
tastes and how bad it is for us. The better it tastes, the worse it is for us. There is some eternal equation.)
No. 3: BUTTER. Nothing improves the taste of anything as much as butter. Fake butter was an unfortunate invention and it isn’t much cheaper or any better for you than the real thing.
No. 4: BREAD. It is with some hesitation that I put bread on the list because commercial bread in the United States is terrible. How it ever happened that the French eat such great bread every day and Americans eat such bad bread is a mystery.
A great breadmaker in the Bronx named Terranova makes a round loaf so hard you can drum on it with your fingers. When I asked him what he put in his bread to make it so good, he said, “It’s what I don’t put in it that makes it good.”
In spite of the waxed-paper-wrapped mush in the supermarkets, almost every city or town has a good bakery where you can get real bread. You can tell a good restaurant before you eat your meal by the bread it serves.
No. 5: CHOCOLATE. Clearly one of the ten best tastes, chocolate is another thing Europeans make better than we do. A chocolate bar from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland or even England is better than one