My mother-in-law sent her usual box of goodies for the holidays, including mini chocolate bars and peanutbutter chocolate cups; my trip to the grocery store these past weeks have yielded up sugared fruit slices, special cakes, cookies and coated marshmallows. Boxes of chocolates left over from Valentine’s Day sales still sit on my counter and our local ice cream parlor has been open for a month.

Thankfully, my chicks have always had access to sweets in moderation, so having all this sugar in the house is more a danger to my own health than that of my children. My kids can take or leave most of the chocolates and other sugary snacks. Why can’t I?

The downside is we end up eating closer to 9 p.m. than anything else. I used to tell the babes that we subscribed to the European model and let them graze until I got home and could make dinner. Ah, the stories we tell our children!

Recently, we’ve been stretching dinner out even later. My youngest, unlike her siblings, actually has some major after-school activities and she doesn’t get back from them until 9 or 9:30 p.m. Thankfully, her sporting season is over now, but she’s substituted driver’s education and we still see her closer to 9 p.m. when we all sit down for food before going off to our usual night-time activities.

So it was with a sense of unreality that we all sat down to dinner at 6:30 p.m. one day earlier this week.

First there were the vampire jokes (The Light! It Burns!!!). Then there was the quietness — no phone calls from people who refuse to remember we eat late and call us at 9 p.m. Then there was the sense of eating lunch instead of dinner. And there was the unexpected free time when the food was gone and it was hours before everybody’s usual bedtime.

With the days getting longer, we’ll probably be seeing more of each other in the daylight even with our usual dinner time, and the traditional daylight jokes will be trotted out and tried one more time. For us, it’s one of the rituals of summertime. Other families may change their winter plastic tablecloths for summer ones or use brightly colored plastic plates. We hone our vampire jokes.

Or so I thought.

For years, her default meal at fast-food restaurants and our local fish place was chicken nuggets; when I do my weekly grocery shopping, I usually pick up a package of frozen nuggets to have in the house for after-school or those days my husband and I have things to do at dinner time and the kids are on their own.

This past Sunday, the usual nuggets I buy, which have a gluten-free coating, weren’t where I could find them, so I picked up a box of the old-fashioned nuggets we used when our youngest was still in single digits. That night, I had my usual baked/fried chicken meal, so the nuggets weren’t out of their box until lunch on Monday.

I made 6 of the old-fashioned nuggets. My youngest ate three of them, then stopped.

“These taste like fast-food nuggets,” she said.

“And?”

“Well, we had real chicken for dinner last night .. and we don’t usually get this kind any more … and I don’t like them.”

I believe she’s developing a palate.

“These are to match the dishes,” she had messaged with the photo.

Shortly before she moved to her own place, she and I visited a consignment store looking for a couch, and found a set of hunt dishes in a cabinet with a price tag that I can’t remember, but with a pattern I can: half the plates had pictures of pheasants on them, the other half had, I believe, grouse.

We then discussed the use of special dishes for special occasions, with reference to the bone china set she inherited from her grandmother and which were too good for myself and my siblings to use when we lived at home, or when we came to visit after we grew up and had families of our own.

My oldest planned to use the china for her everyday dishes, but kept getting flack from everybody she mentioned it to: coworkers, friends and acquaintances. I was all for using the dishes. What good are dishes that nobody uses? She was waffling, but still planned to use them for important guests.

Probably the single reason why they’re still sitting in the hutch in her living room is because she, like other people in her state of life, doesn’t actually make food and sit down at a table and eat it.

I had suggested she get in the habit of making dinner a sit-down affair, even in her singlehood, as a sign of respect for herself. And by all means, she should use her fancy dishes.

We plan to visit on Sunday, after her new couch is delivered. I’m curious whether she’ll invite us for dinner, and whether her dad and I are important enough to bring out the good dishes.

One of our favorite aisles is the book aisle, and we like to cruise through the cookbook offerings, of which there are many.

I asked her if she needed any new books — she’s a fan of the Barefoot Contessa — which she declined. She has a half-dozen books, most purchased for her by her grandmothers, which are heavy on Rachel Ray. I don’t think she’s opened even one since she got them, but she likes to look at the pictures. Don’t we all.

She’s much more practical than I am. She only wants to have a half-dozen cookbooks on her shelf, one of which is Betty Crocker’s, the one she learned much of her cooking technique from.

I, on the other hand, probably have 45 cookbooks, most of which collect dust. I probably use one or two routinely, and am thinking of thinning the herd.

Any thoughts on which two or three cookbooks ought to be in every kitchen?

The refrigerator has juice, cider and milk; there’s leftover pasta from dinner three nights ago, leftover chicken from last night and something from a while back that has turned various colors and is unrecognizable but still hanging around in the back regardless. There are packages of wraps, rolls and hotdogs, too. Not to mention peanut butter and jam.

There is some leftover Chinese food, a leftover half sandwich from my dinner last night and there is bread in the bread bin along with a half loaf of wheat ciabatta in the microwave. There’s frozen pizza, frozen crab cakes, frozen buffalo chicken nuggets, frozen meat and poultry and ice cream in the freezer.

Apparently this isn’t food.

I believe what he wants are cold cuts. I’m not a big fan. I am a realist, though, when it comes to kids and food. I wonder if he’ll consider low-sodium turkey acceptable?

We spent last weekend wandering around kitchen stores and kitchen outlet stores looking at gear. She has a lot of stuff from her college apartment, and inherited some stuff from when my mother died last October, but you can always use more knives, we figure.

She and I share a passion for very sharp knives. So we’ve been checking out knife displays and discussing which of the many knives in my kitchen she can have for her own kitchen. I have a short-bladed Victorinox paring knife I’m willing to let her have and a large-bladed Santoku knife I was going to pack along with her stuff, both from my mother’s kitchen. Then there’s one of our two bread knives, one of my three carving knives — how many knives does it take to start a kitchen, I wonder?

Apparently he dips everything he can get into his 3-year-old hands in ranch: grapes, breakfast cereal, cookies, ice cream—and his mother and grandmother travel with a small tub of ranch to keep him happy.

It’s been 13 years since I had a child that young and have forgotten all the little things you do to keep peace until this came up. Now I think of it, I recall my sister’s complaint that her son (who is now a sophomore in college) would only eat peanut butter, and preferred to dip things into it much as the youngest member of our extended family does today.

Well, eventually the ranch phase will depart, much as my nephew’s peanut butter phase went away. I just can’t get the image of dipping ice cream in ranch dressing out of my mind, though.

In order to correct the address, he backspaced to the order page, attempted to correct the address, and then went through with payment.

Surprise! When he arrived in Ohio, his parents showed him the results of his labors: four cases of pears.

It seems the original order was a two-for-one, and his moving back and forth within the site meant he put in his order twice. And when he came home after his trip out to middle America, he returned with a case of pears just about a day shy of being really, really ripe.

Now, pears are fine in their way. I don’t happen to be a fan and neither are two of our three children, but my husband likes pears and eats one a week, generally. Our oldest occasionally eats a pear, too.

But what do you do with an entire case of them? The best we can come up with is some sort of pear brown betty, but if someone has a better idea for something we can do with a case of pears pretty near the end of their eat-ability, you’ll have my undying gratitude.

The years have changed the gifts from small plastic frogs and harmonicas to book lights and gift cards, but what hasn’t changed is the tradition of drifting by the fireplace during the weeks of December, counting up who has how many packages.

What’s also tradition is that I get the fewest number of gifts. This year, my youngsters decided that wouldn’t be so.

I got the regulation gift cards, of course, from my husband, but I had seven small gifts in odd-shaped packages waiting for me as well, putting me one-up from my husband and tied with my two oldest children in number of gifts.

What my enterprising children did was purchase two silicone mitts and a set of metal measuring cups and wrap them up separately. The first gift I opened was the 1/4 cup, nicely tied up with a bow all to itself. I opened the third-cup measure next, in its own package. Then came the rest, one by one. They also wrapped up the ring that holds the measuring cups as a set.

Frankly, I’m still laughing. And here’s a wish for laughter and good kitchen memories to all for the upcoming year.