Stuffing deserves to be dinner

Back when Twitter was still the kind of place where a stray observation could become communal property by lunchtime — before the app hardened quite so completely into a highly polarized, hyper-monetized digital town square populated by tech founders and crypto traders flashing what’s beneath their metaphorical trench coats — one particular idea seemed to resurface every so often: You can simply buy yourself a birthday cake.

The version I remember best was comedian Andrew Nadeau’s: “Turns out you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and eat it yourself. Nobody checks.” And, in the Twitter style of the time, once somebody landed on the joke, everyone else began taking little runs at it: refining the wording, extending the premise, adding nachos or Diet Coke or the marvel of having “adult money.” The revelation remained essentially the same. There is no birthday-cake authority. No one at the bakery asks for identification. No clerk leans across the counter and demands proof that a candle-worthy occasion has actually occurred.

Over here on the savory side, I’m equally evangelical about freeing stuffing from Thanksgiving.