Bed pie is not a common holiday tradition. In fact, my husband Matt and I made it up, but we’ve been proselytizing it to every person we know since the day we accidentally invented it. We’ve gotten laughter from people who think it’s a joke, raised eyebrows from people who think we cannot possibly be serious. But it is real, and it is about to become the best holly jolly moment of your entire freaking December.
Here’s how you do it:
Step one: Get a pie
Step two: Get a single fork
Step three: Get into bed with the one(s) you love
Step four: Eat the pie
That is all.
When we engaged in our first bed pie, we had no idea the magnitude of what we had stumbled upon. On our counter was a box of leftover pie from a holiday party the night before, in our sink a mountain of dirty dishes that neither Matt nor I felt like doing. In fact, I refused to even leave our bed, since staying wrapped in a comforter in the dead of winter is the path of least resistance. Matt braved the cold to grab the pie, still in its box, a can of whipped cream, and the only clean fork in the house. For a moment I worried about the agony of a bed full of crumbs, or an errant spray of Redi-Whip landing on our comforter. But sheets can be changed, comforters washed, and on a frigid Sunday morning with Christmas specials queued up on Netflix, laziness would most definitely win.
Rationalizing our actions was easy. When you think about it, pie is not really meant to be sliced, is it? It’s almost impossible to plate a slice of pie amply packed with tender, spiced fruit without it deconstructing on the path from pan to plate. If that was the aesthetic you were going for you could have saved yourself the trouble of fiddling with finicky pie dough and made a cobbler instead, but no. You want pie’s flaky buttery layers, the bits of crust that caramelized just a bit too much due to a bit of bubbling over or an errant slosh of custard. If anything, we were doing this pie a favor. We were honoring it, eating it the way it should have be eaten, throwing decorum to the wind and fully immersing ourselves in what it was: a marvel, a miracle. A single serving.
Bed Pie was not meant to be a sexy-time activity, yet there’s something about it that’s remarkably intimate. There was magic between those two crusts, amidst the blankets and pillows and crumpled up sheets. In a world where we force ourselves to have some modicum of self-control, bed pie is a liberating moment of gluttony that can only occur when you drop all the safeguards you’ve put in place to give the impression you are a civilized human being. You are raw and uninhibited, embracing your animal instincts, devouring each bite with ravenous glee. You are declaring mastery over your supposed adulthood, allowing yourself to have the second and third and fourth pieces you were denied as a child, sharing that moment of self-actualization with another human being. No one will ever see you in a rawer state than when you are eating Bed Pie—no one will offer themselves as honestly to you in return.
Eventually we had children and the holidays went from hectic to insane, which made bed pie even more essential to our lives. For a child, December is 31 straight days of G-rated candy-fueled hedonism, like Cancun by way of North Pole. When we scoop them up and lay them down for Bed Pie, the mood changes. Time slows down. They stay little boys for just a bit longer.
The reminders to love thy neighbor at the holidays are relentless, guilting you into surprise visits and travel nightmares and more than a few nights of staying out way past your bedtime (and paying for it the next day). Bed Pie is pause. It’s suspension in a state of bliss and wonder, muting the endless noise outside your bedroom, keeping it quiet for as long as the pie still exists. It’s a tether to your spiritual home, the person that you love, the person who you need no reminder to love the other eleven months out of the year. It’s crumbs and crust and pudding and stuff, and it belongs to nobody else but you.