However you make it, that Raw strawberry slice is beautiful, isn't it!

Next month I start my various baking projects as gifts for people. I make banana bread (one with extra banana so it is very cake-like), pumpkin bread, zucchini bread, etc. I try to make consumable gifts for people instead of buying things that just sit around or might not have been the right thing and needs exchanging. No one ever asks to exchange the holiday breads (though if I give them the option they usually express a preference for one. Of all of them, I think the zucchini bread is the one overall in most demand.)

The succession at our house when I was a kid was that we had the pumpkin to carve for a jack-o'-lantern and then it was in the fridge or freezer until it was time to use it to bake for Thanksgiving. The carving pumpkins here now-a-days are pulpy bleh, and I still have frozen pumpkin from last year.

One of the cable channels has started playing xmas movies all day every day. The "Lifetime" type, Hallmark Channel knockoffs mostly filmed in Canada on a shoestring. I think I'll pick up some candy corn this week to push the other holidays back out of sight for a little while longer.