By Josh Emrys Payong

JOE ROSENFIELD ‘25 CENTER – “We’re not fucking around this year,” declared a spokesperson of Grinnell Dining Services when asked about the menu for this year’s Christmas Dessert Table, “We’ve got people putting their lives on the line for that $20 Vinyl Stop gift card.”

This year, in response to relatively mild reception from partakers of past editions of the Holiday Dessert Extravaganza event, the stakes have been raised. It is now a competition — titled the First Annual Yuletide Hunger Games™ (Dessert Edition) — with judge Anne Harris designing the criteria herself, which include (but are not limited to): presentation, creativity, social commentary, affordability, and bloodshed, each of which has a prize up for grabs. The wide array of ways to succeed has produced an even wider variety of strategies.

Some competitors opted to remain steadfast in their belief in the classics. Lou, 68, a lifetime Grinnell local, prepared a humble batch of frosted Christmas cookies and fruit cakes with apples picked from before the frost and preserved in sugar syrup. Yum!

Philosophy professor Dante Alighairy, on the other hand, brought something a little more dramatic to the table: brownies from hell. More specifically, the batter is cooled and set upon the icy lake of the 9th circle of hell (the home of Satan and those judged with the sin of betrayal, which you’d remember if you didn’t skip half of FYE) before being baked within the blazing depths of the 6th circle, where heretics are trapped in fiery, open tombs for denying the soul’s immortality. Won the prize for most eco-friendly dessert, as no electricity was used in its creation.

The loss of the eco-friendly prize was not received well by the environmental science major (you could do that? I didn’t know you could do that) Cretta Dunnburg ‘27, who produced a yule log cake bleeding strawberry filling from the sides to represent the devastated forests of the world. Unfortunately for her, climate activism with no action couldn’t reverse the atmospheric damage done by her nightly smoking of twenty joints on the South fire escapes.

A retired physics professor (who shall not be named out of ethical concerns and to maintain his mysterious, nonchalant aura) brought the rush of a moral dilemma straight to the desert table with his Schrödinger’s gingerbread cookies, where you don’t know whether you’re biting into a real elf or a disturbingly realistic, crying-loudly-in-anguish, clove-scented sweet replica of one. This dish won both the Most Thrilling and Most Arousing prizes…but also neither, as Grinnell does not wish to condone elficide.

Some competitors came from distant lands to partake in this grand game. Zohran Fucking Mamdani (not to be confused with recently elected, extremely attractive New York mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani) flew in from the East Coast to participate in this coveted event and bring to us a taste of the Big Apple: a rat-shaped New York cheesecake covered in rusty pennies and pepperoni. They were disqualified for giving four students the Tetanus That Makes You Communist. How terrible.

Some competitors enrolled in Grinnell solely to win honor for their impoverished hometown through this event. Blongyonk Johnson ‘28 from Planet Greeplizoid is one such student, hoping to wow some Iowans with his home planet’s signature desserts. He was the last Greepler standing after a brutal planetwide champion baker selection process. Unfortunately, Dining Services couldn’t spare a mere $300 billion to procure Blongyonk’s ingredients straight from the source, showing that speciesism is alive and well on this campus.

Even with this prejudice taking place, controversy stirred around the centerpiece gingerbread house, designed by the same disgraced architect who produced Renfrow Hall and built with gingerbread mined with unpaid labor from Central Park. Dining Services has yet to comment on this matter and has attempted to distract us with fresh grapes at D-Hall. For better or for worse, we seem to have fallen for it.

As the semester ends and finals are here, we consulted Isabel Smith ‘25.5 and Jackie Harris ‘25.5 for their insight from graduating early into an important question: what kind of underground Grinnellian are you?