Many have asked how I, Wren Buehler, do it all. How am I so okay at humor writing while also being so okay at academics? How do I have such luscious hair while still having time to play with dead bugs? And how can I pull, despite routinely dedicating multiple hours a week to playing board games?
Let me let you in on a little secret: Every year, as the days grow shorter, I partake in copious quantities of the most nutritious red slop you can legally eat. That’s right, I eat six pounds of cranberry sauce every year, and you can too, if you follow along with the attached guide.
1. Make the sauce
What, did you think you could get results with sauce out of a can? Don’t fuck with me. I’ll kill you. Making the sauce is the most important step of the process, but it’s not complicated. I prefer to use the sauce recipe I discovered scrawled on the walls of a tomb in primeval picture-script, but I can’t share that, so I’d recommend just using the one on the back of the Ocean Spray bag.
The most important thing to remember when making cranberry sauce is that it is a fundamentally Orphic process. The sauce is Eurydice, and you are the doomed bard. If you let doubt creep in for even a moment—convince yourself that the sauce is overboiling, and cut the heat—then the batch will be ruined, and your wife will be consigned to Hades. So don’t do that.
2. Thanksgiving Day
This is phase one of your sauce-eating, and it requires you to make some sacrifices. Not human ones. Not human sacrifices. I don’t endorse that. I want to make it clear to anyone reading this who might be in the jury for my upcoming trial that I do not endorse human sacrifice.
I just mean you’d better not load up on turkey and sweet potato casserole. This is night one of your transformation, so you’d better get at least a pound in now.
3. The week afterwards
Now here’s where things kick into high gear. Every meal you eat for a week afterwards should have a bowl of cranberry sauce with it. Every snack should be replaced with cranberry sauce. Put it on toast. In a sandwich. Eat it on its own.
Before you know it, you’ll have eaten six pounds of cranberry sauce!
But that’s not enough, is it? You won’t be satisfied. I never am.
4. Make more sauce
After Thanksgiving, cranberries are on sale. Buy them. Make more sauce. You’ve outgrown your doubt. You know nothing is overboiling. Everything is proceeding as planned.
5. Submerge yourself in sauce
Sauce is the blood of the cranberry; sticky-sweet and half-congealed. You cannot merely fill yourself with sauce. You must surround yourself with it. Make more. A bathtub’s worth. When it’s full, lower yourself in. Feel the cranberries engulfing your body, a Hellmouth eager to swallow you and spit you out. Close your eyes and let your head fall below the sauce.
6. Sauce floods my mind
I cannot remember my name. I cannot remember my face. I cannot hear my loved ones retch as they find my body slowly mellifying in an unparting Red Sea. Such things are beneath me. All I need do is fall into a deep sleep. I open my mouth and let the sauce pour into my lungs.
I have returned to the womb. Cranberry sauce is my new mother.
7. Enjoy the end of the semester!
Congratulations. If everything has gone to plan, you’ve eaten six pounds of cranberry sauce and are ready to return to campus as a new woman. I hope you’re happy. I know I am!