Coconut Day

Posted on June 26, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I don’t like coconut, in pretty much any form. Not in Mounds or Almond Joy, not dyed green and posing as easter grass on cupcakes, not as milk, not as oil. I avoided suntan lotion for years because I assumed it all smelled like Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil and was only educated otherwise after we moved to Florida and I got sun poisoning after falling asleep outdoors one afternoon.

I remember my grandfather bought a coconut on a whim one time. It sat on his workbench in their garage for several years, just gathering dust into its hairy self and occasionally falling on someone’s foot. Finally I asked for permission to see what was inside and took a hammer to it. I learned later that the coconut innards are supposed to mold and rot, but this thing was just sort of mummified with a big hollow space in the middle. And it was a struggle to get it apart; I think along with the hammer I ended up needing a chisel.

I only have one favorable coconut story. When the kid was small, we went to New York to meet up with my dad, who was there for some Egypt thing or another. We went to a game at the … what, the new-old Yankee stadium, the one that went away in 2008. We ate a lot of nice dinners. And we went to see Spamalot on Broadway, which we all enjoyed immensely. We raised that kid right; he’d already memorized the Holy Grail and knew quite a few Flying Circus sketches. He also had indulgent family members, so when his grandpa bought him a killer bunny puppet, I didn’t feel too bad about also buying him a fake coconut shell split in half and tied together with red yarn. The kid clopped from the theater to some nearby diner for early dinner; we wandered in with probably half the matinee audience.

Our waiter was lovely. He asked if we enjoyed the show, he took our orders, he was attentive to and not exasperated by my picky eater kid who wanted a burger with just the meat and the bun and NOTHING ELSE. As he was wrapping up with the usual “I’ll get that in for you right away,” Thomas picked up his coconuts and started clopping again. I was about to tell him to knock it off when I looked up and saw the waiter prancing away, one hand up in front of him, the other behind his back, like the best Graham Chapman King Arthur you ever saw. Thomas was over the moon, and that guy got a tip that was probably double our bill.

And that is the one and only time I ever liked coconuts. And it wasn’t even a real coconut.

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Color TV Day

Posted on June 25, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My husband occasionally shares the story about how he was 11 before he found out that the Wizard of Oz was in color despite having seen it every year of his life. The joy of being a child of the 60s who lived in a world of black-and-white TV.

He’s ten years older than I am, but he was about 15 years up on me, because my family went without a TV entirely from around the time I was three until I turned 10 or so. We had a television for my formative Sesame Street years, but when something shorted in it and it caught fire one day, we just didn’t replace it. My dad glued a picture of Howdy Doody to the picture tube, and its main function was as a very large and extremely heavy flat surface for mail, books, and the other typical detritus that clutters most unclaimed flat surfaces.

So my television experiences were severely curtailed compared with those of my friends. I missed out entirely on the whole Mork and Mindy thing, although I picked up some by osmosis in school. I didn’t know anything about All in the Family, and I was 20 before I saw an episode of Happy Days. To date, I am pretty sure I have viewed exactly one scene of Welcome Back Kotter, and John Travolta was not in it.

My parents were not complete luddites, however. Every Christmas, they would rent a set for a week so I could watch Rudolph and Charlie Brown and they could watch all the college bowl games.

When I was 7 or 8, I started being sent to my grandparents’ house in Virginia for a stint every summer. I always spent the first few days on the trampoline, and would then get a terrible case of heat rash and retreat to the one cool spot in the state as far as I knew, which was the basement. There was a TV down there, but my grandparents didn’t have cable (they might not even have had an antenna,) so pickings were slim and I spent more time reading and listening to records—an interesting mishmash of Disney soundtracks (the Aristocats, 101 Dalmatians) and old comedy (Tom Lehrer and the Bickersons). I know we all sat down there and watched TV at night on more than one occasion, but the only things I really remember seeing were movies of the week and episodes of the Love Boat, which my grandmother and I loved laughing at but left a permanent scowl on my grandfather’s face.

And then, when I was 10, for whatever reason, the clouds parted and my parents got not only a color TV but cable to boot. With HBO! I sat through many airings of Superman before I got bored. I still wasn’t allowed to watch during the day if my parents were around, but during the winters I learned it was time to leave for school after Bozo the Clown helped those kids chuck ping pong balls into buckets for prizes. In the summers, my dad would leave for work and my mom wouldn’t get up til 10 or 11, so I got a lot of syndicated bad TV in those hours: I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched, and Hazel. I am pretty sure Alice aired in the mornings too; I can’t imagine when else I would have seen Linda Lavin in that waitress getup.

Color TV is not a big deal now, of course. In fact, my kid routinely turns the color off as a “different take” or so he can watch Star Trek “the way Dad saw it the first time.” It is funny to me; sort of like when my grandma would laugh at me for asking her to show me how to sew instead of just buying the bloody dress. “Civilization advanced so that we don’t HAVE to this!” she would protest when the bobbin thread broke for the 900th time. I feel sort of the same, but I get where the kid is coming from.

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Praline Day

Posted on June 24, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I’ve never been a nut person. If offered salt in snack form, I always opted for potato chips. At a ballpark, I might countenance Cracker Jack, but I never ate peanuts. (And I was shocked and appalled the first time I saw a friend of mine eat them WITH THE SHELLS ON LIKE SIR WHAT ARE YOU DOING!)

I didn’t like nuts in my chocolate. Plain M&Ms, please. I thought it was weird to put walnuts in cookies or in salads. I ate around any slivered almonds that showed up in green bean dishes and I didn’t care about candied almonds at weddings. I didn’t understand why you would put pecans in ice cream—even my beloved grandmother couldn’t make me understand that one.

And yet, somehow, somewhere along the line, someone tricked me into eating pralines and cream ice cream at Baskin Robbins, and I had a new favorite. And then my grandfather went to New Orleans and brought us gifts of actual pralines, praline liqueur, and some kind of ice cream topping. I’ve never gone back on this taste; I love it.

My husband, on the other hand, is a nut fiend, who is “not especially” interested in pralines. I don’t see how this man who gorges on cashews and hazelnuts and I don’t know what all can turn up his nose at a praline, but here we are. It’s fine. More for each of us!

This may also be part of why I love visiting New Orleans and he is tepid on it. (Probably not.) I insist on leaving town with at least one box of the stuff, and he keeps asking how I’ll ever at them all. The answer is slowly, but I will do it!

Anyway, pralines became a sort of entrée into the world of nuts for me. I snarfed cashews, I decided Mr. Goodbar was an acceptable choice of chocolate, I discovered that trout amandine is in fact pretty dang good.

But Baskin Robbins will always be my first choice for nut consumption.

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Pink Day

Posted on June 23, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It took me a long time to embrace pink as a motif in my life. I always liked it, and I was a massive girly girl from early on. I liked rhinestones and sequins, I liked chiffon and lace, I liked skirts and makeup and all of it.

But my mother, who was a total tomboy, had exactly zero frame of reference for this and even less patience. There was very little pink in the world she provided for me. She yanked my hair into braids more as a way to avoid tangles and less as a fashion statement. She put me in primary-color polyester pants because they shed dirt like Teflon until I rebelled in second grade and we agreed on a shift to blue jeans although I still snuck off in prairie skirts and patent leather shoes whenever she wasn’t looking.

For some reason, my grandmothers never picked up on this conflict. They sent me dresses, but generally in shades of blue or cream. Somehow, I got it in my head that pink just wasn’t a thing that normal people did. It’s funny. I still don’t wear much pink. I have one pink dress that I bought because it was in a cut that I like and one of the three patterns I didn’t have already. (This pattern has been discontinued. I can only hope these dresses last long enough that I don’t need to buy new clothes until I’m into another age bracket and wearing Actual Old Lady Stuff.)

When I was 14, we moved into a new house and I was finally allowed to decorate my room in a way I wanted. Going for the gusto, I demanded that the walls be painted hot pink, more vivid than Barbie doll boxes. This was softened by white curtains, white furniture, and these flower-print cream colored quilts that my mom had made for me years before in an uncharacteristic nod to my girly nature.

I loved that bedroom. If you looked in my window from the street at night while the light was on, it looked like my room was on fire. It took literally three coats of paint to cover up when we sold the house. (This was another valuable lesson, to be honest. I’ve never painted another room that vivid a color.)

For a long time after that, I was at the mercy of college dorms and rented houses. I also had destructive dogs and a limited budget. All the clothes I owned were either black or cautious neutrals for maximum mixing and matching. I hazarded a floral print now and then, but that was it.

When my kid was born, something flipped in me. My girl dog died, so I was the lone girl in a house with a husband, a son, and a boy dog. I started small. I bought pink pens. I bought a pink clipboard. When I got my own office, I got bolder. I bought pink silk flowers and pink glass vases. I played up the pink in my print of the Hallucinogenic Toreador by getting a lamp in a matching color. When I got a larger office, I bought a rug. I displayed some dishes my grandma gave me that had pink roses.

By that time, the gender balance at home had shifted in my favor, albeit in animal form. The hubs and son were outnumbered by me, two girl cats, and a girl dog—not that any of my allies cared about pink or lace, unless it was something they could eat or barf on.

Then COVID hit. I went home. Pink went into storage.

But when we moved, I staked a claim on a downstairs room to be my office. It is a girly delight. All my pinkness is on display, and I got myself a pink office chair and a pink typing keyboard. I have a pink pillow and a pink blanket. It is a lovely space. I almost never go in there these days because I prefer working in bed or on the sofa, but I still go in there to hide, and it still makes me happy.

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Kissing Day

Posted on June 22, 2025 by arwenbicknell

We’ve probably all had bad kissing experiences, no? I haven’t spent any time asking men about this, but most of the women I know have at least one story of training a guy not to slobber or of their own mishaps while learning how to navigate braces.

And then there are those melty, knee-buckling ones that cloud your vision and judgment and make you do all kinds of stupid things for better or for worse.

I will say that I don’t think I could have stayed married as long as I have if the hubs was anything less than adept, but I also know better than to kiss and tell. So instead, let’s focus on the standard by which a lot of us live by: kisses in cinema.

Of course, there are lots of famous kissing scenes. Gone with the Wind. Casablanca. That scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is so overwrought he almost looks like he’s going to bite off Donna Reed’s face and crush her shoulders into pulp. Ghost got a lot of mileage in its time, as did Dirty Dancing. Pretty Woman. Titanic. The Princess Bride.

One of my more vivid memories along these lines is seeing Top Gun at the age of 15 with my bestie at the time and both of us being a bit yucked out at the love scene that involved way more silhouetted tongues than either of us had seen up to that point. We both had boyfriends, we knew what kissing and petting involved; we just hadn’t ever thought about what it looked like from a third-party perspective, and we were also of an age where groping was more interesting than licking—after all, we had adoring dogs for the latter activity. (And one of the best all-time movie kisses has to go to the animated Lady and the Tramp, so there’s also that.)

The first kissing scene I saw in a theater that felt real to me was in Say Anything. Latter-day creepy stalker interpretations aside, that movie held a lot of feels for me, and Peter Gabriel’s song In Your Eyes didn’t hurt one bit.

My kid’s favorite kissing scene is the upside-down Spider-Man kiss between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.

But as usual, my husband won the discussion. His favorite kissing scene is the montage at the end of Cinema Paradiso, and it’s pretty much impossible to argue with that from any angle. It’s a great reel, it’s presented in the perfect context, and the story behind the existence of the montage encapsulates the message of the movie. If the ending of that movie doesn’t leave you visibly moved, I probably don’t want to know you.

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Cookie Dough Day

Posted on June 21, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I am not what you’d call an exemplar overall. I was an honor roll student with As and Bs, and my pride and desire to please generally require that I do a passable job on most things I try, but I do not shine. I’m an editor by trade, but I am pretty much hanging at the top of the bell curve among my co-workers. I can be amusing, but I am not great at generating comedy on my own.

One thing I am reasonably proficient at is baking cookies. I think every person I know who even dabbles in baking has at least one “mine is better than anyone’s” recipe, and I’m not going to try to boast that any of mine actually are better. I will say I get compliments, and that my skills have improved over the years.

So rather than brag on my dough, I’ll share a few tips about skills that I’ve acquired and impressions that I’ve formed.

Butter is butter. Salted, unsalted, light or yellow. I’m a butter snob in that I won’t use margarine and I’m not a fan of Crisco unless there’s a specific need for it (going dairy-free or making something thick that needs a higher melting point). I’ve never tried lard; that’s on my list to do one of these days. But as far as butter goes—generic is fine. Some people swear by Kerrygold and won’t use anything else, but honestly, I’ve done side by side tests and the results are not twice as good, so I don’t think it’s worth paying double the price. I can taste the difference when buttering a roll (and it doesn’t taste twice as good, either), but in cookies (even shortbread, where the butter is key to the flavor), I’m not finding it.

Vanilla is NOT vanilla. It doesn’t seem like something that’s a tiny fraction of the overall cookie should matter so much, but it really does. Imitation vanilla is OK, but it’s not as robust. I think all of us learned as children not to drink vanilla extract, which is generally the go-to flavoring choice. Recently, I have switched to vanilla paste, which packs more of a punch—and tastes better when you lick the spoon. My mom turns her nose up at this for certain things; she likes the subtlety of the extract in cheesecake and made faces when I used the paste. It also leaves flecks, so if you’re going for snow-white dough or frosting, that’s another time to stick with the extract.

Beyond that, I’m a proponent of playing with ingredients. Swap out vanilla for almond or other extracts. (This is especially good for the icing used on Christmas cookies.) Use brown sugar (or vanilla sugar!) instead of plain white. Try chopped chocolate instead of chocolate chips. If you’re using a recipe that calls for melted butter (they do exist), try browned butter instead. It took me decades to perfect my chocolate chip cookies, and a lot of it involved variations on salt and other flavoring.

Time matters, in all kinds of ways. First, I’m not sure why this is true, but it does make a difference to start with room-temperature butter and eggs. For one thing, soft butter isn’t as messy in the mixer as the hard stuff. But logistics aside, I have noticed that the final texture is a little less crunchy if you start with warmer stuff.

Second, when you cream your butter and sugar, go longer than you think you need to. Don’t just start adding other ingredients once everything is blended. You’ll want to go at least 2 minutes and up to 5, depending on your mixer, to get the light color and fluffy texture that goes a long way to making a good final product. On the other hand, you don’t want to overmix as you’re adding flour; if you keep mixing after everything is incorporated, the final cookies are tougher and harder.

Third, if you are making an all-butter cookie, take the time to chill your dough before baking so the butter is firmer at the outset and takes longer to melt when baking. If you have a crowded fridge like I do, it’s fine to chill the dough in the bowl and then bust it up for baking, but if you have the room, it does make a difference to put the cookies on to pans and then chill the pans—either way, the cookies hold their shape better and the texture is a little nicer, but the effect is more pronounced if the pans are cold. This sounds counterintuitive to my first point, but it makes sense in that slightly melted butter mixes well, but firmer butter holds its shape longer in the oven and thus maintains the structure and air pockets longer.

Good luck! Tell me what you come up with!

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Take Your Dog to Work Day

Posted on June 20, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It was Take Your Cat to Work Day a few weeks back, and although I love cats, I wonder how good a day this is. I am not sure your average cat appreciates that kind of upheaval, and I wonder about the strange flavor of cat that would enjoy not only being in a weird place for 8–10 hours but also the commute to and from that place. I am sure such cats exist, but experience tells me they are a minority of the species.

Dogs, on the other hand, seem like a much better fit for office revelry. And I love this day, although productivity certainly drops when there’s a dog to be fawned over.

My first experience with a dog in a nontraditional space was when my grandparents helped me move into my dorm at USC. My grandfather brought Frodo, his Irish setter, and toward the end of the day, when all boxes and heavy lifting were clearly completed by everyone on my floor, he let the dog off the leash to do sprints up and down the hall. I’ve never heard a bigger chorus of feminine Awwws than I did that day. That dog got a lot of love, and I got asked many times when he’d be visiting again. (Grandpa brought him around again once or twice, but never at peak residency hours, so that first experience was never repeated.)

And yet, the only time I ever took a dog to work was because my dog Annie had surgery and the vet sent her home but told me to keep an eye on her. I worked nights on a copy desk in Sarasota, and I knew she was so stoned she’d be good, so I took my shot. (It’s weird; I don’t remember what the surgery was. I would swear it was to get her spayed, but I’d had her for a couple years by then and I can’t imagine I would have waited so long. Anyway, moving on.) I snuck her in and stuffed her under my cubicle desk while my boss was off doing something, and she was there for five hours before anyone noticed she was there. Eventually I had to take her outside and a couple people came over and fussed over her when we came back in. My boss was inclined to be gruff about it, but when he got a load of her sad, spaced out face, he melted and just warned me not to do it again.

As y’all are well aware by now, I work from home. For me, it has been Take Your Dog to Work day every day since 2020!

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Garfield Day

Posted on June 19, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I assume we are all familiar with the original Grumpy Cat created by Jim Davis, who hails from the Hoosier State, same as my husband. Alas, my husband did not catch lightning in a bottle and form an empire based on a cartoon cat. Then again, if he had, he probably wouldn’t be my husband, so it’s all good.

Garfield came on the scene in 1976 as a cartoon called Jon, which changed in 1977 to Garfield. He got nationally syndicated in 1978, and it was such a pop culture phenomenon that it registered even on my radar as a second-grader. My parents got the Chicago Tribune delivered, but at that age, the only things I read were the comics page and the horoscope, with an occasional foray into Dear Abby. It was quite a shock when the cat showed up on the banner of the front page with an accompanying article about how the cartoon had taken the world by storm. That might have been the first time I read a news article of my own volition. I’m sorry to say that it didn’t develop into a habit at that point; I was similarly startled a couple years later when Larry Hagman’s face was in the banner for literally weeks during the Who Shot J.R. summer of speculation.

My friend Kelly, who adored all things feline, had pet cats, and drew pictures like it was as natural as breathing, was a huge fan and became pretty adept at copying the style of the cartoons, adding her own snarky thought bubbles. This would have been bizarre enough to me—she never drew Snoopy or those goofball Family Circus kids—she never even drew Heathcliff. But then we started seeing Garfield everywhere. T-shirts. Coffee mugs. Little bendy plastic figures. Playing cards, greeting cards, entire paperback books of reprints.

And stationery. This is a craze that has died out, I think. I’m not sure if it happened with the advent of email or before that, but for a few years there from the late 70s through the early 80s, you were nobody if you didn’t own several 3×5 notepads (and envelopes, if your parents were flush) that were embossed with Garfield, Miss Piggy, and the like. You also wanted the Garfield pen, or the pencil topper. And this stuff was expensive, so you wrote rough drafts of notes before you let that special pen touch the actual matching notepaper.

And keep in mind, this was all from a comic strip. In the newspaper. I suspect Garfield was responsible for a lot of kids my age trying lasagna (and perhaps even coffee), and he didn’t show up on TV until the early 1980s—and I’d gotten married and had a kid was born before he showed up on the big screen in 2004. It is a testament to the enduring nature of the character that the only one of my childhood stuffed animals that my kid liked was a stuffed Garfield hugging a tiny stuffed Pookie. My kid also watched a show on Cartoon Network, then picked up my books.

It is interesting to me how times change. I wonder if such a pop fad could erupt today, with no common frame of reference. We are no longer constrained to all read the same community newspaper or choose from three nightly lineups of TV shows. Humans have always united around tragedy—where were you when Kennedy was shot/the Challenger exploded/on September 11. But it’s becoming less common for us to bond over positive things like Garfield, and I think that’s a grave loss. I might be overdramatizing, but I also think this reflects a big shift in our national culture and personality. And it’s not for the better.

Tell me I’m wrong. Give me a positive universally recognized pop culture event from the 2020s.I could use the pick-me-up!

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Splurge Day

Posted on June 18, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Something I have come to appreciate after writing about so many of these Days is how open they are to interpretation. Some of the days have websites with suggested ways to celebrate/observe them; most involve activities like “read about it on the internet” or “talk to your friends about it,” or “meditate on it.”

I suppose you could do those things to observe Splurge Day, but it seems to me that just going out and, you know, splurging might be more fun.

But here, again, things are open to interpretation. In the course of my own lifetime, my definition of what constitutes a splurge has changed dramatically. At one point, getting a Nestle Crunch bar was the height of extravagance to me. Then I moved up to splurging by drinking alcohol that had a name people recognized.

When I was in my mid-20s and basically a 401(k) payment away from living paycheck to paycheck, my car got stolen and my parents came to my rescue. I assumed I’d get one of their cast-offs (my family always has a bunch of spare cars lying around; my widowed mom who lives alone currently has four at her disposal). Instead, they took me out and laid out a chunky down payment to get me a brand-new bright red Saturn that I loved to bits and happily made the teeny monthly payments required of me. Total splurge. 

My standard of living has improved in the intervening 30 years, I am happy to say. Taco Bell is no longer a splurge, unless you are referring to calories. Most of my splurges these days involve travel. We stay at hotels with carpeting and no fist-sized holes in the walls. We take the expensive walking tour with the guide who knows their stuff. We eat at the fancy restaurant.

That said—my pal and I did just go get pedicures a couple weekends, and that was definitely an extravagance.

What’s your splurge comfort level?

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Tesselation Day

Posted on June 17, 2025 by arwenbicknell

What is a tessellation? For a long time, I got this word confused with tesseract, which I was introduced to by the novel A Wrinkle in Time (probably like everyone else who grew up before the Robert Downey Jr. Avengers era).

They are not the same. Tesseracts are four-dimensional hypercubes. Tesseracts are tiled repeating patterns that cover a surface completely without gaps or overlaps—think honeycombs or fish scales. Patterned floor tile or linoleum is probably the example most of us see every day.

The people who made up this holiday chose June 17 because it’s M.C. Escher’s birthday, and his art was big on tessellation-based artwork. I love Escher’s work; one of the fun things about college was all the dudes who ran around in Escher T-shirts. (Secret time: Another fun thing about college was the chance to do a lot of drugs and get really lost in those lithographs—or just wandering around campus and actually noticing just how many tessellations there are around us—leaf patterns, fencing, fabrics. Very distracting!!)

I’d never really thought about the prevalence of patterns before, and I pretty much stopped noticing them once I graduated, but I did maintain a love of houndstooth.

The other thing I never did was learn the math associated with these patterns. I was OK with geometry, but it was like learning a new language that I could get by in but never knew the vernacular or got the in-jokes. Trig? Forget it. My mathy friends tell me that tessellations are fun and easy, but then they start throwing around phrases like internal angles and radii, and I tune out.

Instead, I suggest you take a walk and look for patterns around you. Drugs are optional. 

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