Already, the scent of cinnamon and ginger wafts through crowded supermarket aisles, though sunflowers still turn golden faces to what remains of summer. Shelves groan under the weight of stollen, gingerbread, and other sweet harbingers of winter—months before the first frost kisses the fields. In heartless rhythm, factory lights stay bright through the night, churning out billions of sweets, timeless in shape but tethered to the mechanical tick of the capitalist clock. Exported and consumed beyond borders, these confections spread nostalgia with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine, as cautious innovation and “organic” labels try to polish the image of age-old indulgence.

And yet, my heart aches. Oh, Mother Earth, how you groan beneath this endless appetite, this perpetual anticipation. Where is the season’s sanctity when wildflowers still bloom but the air already tastes of packaged winter? How easily we forget, lured by sweetness, that every biscuit holds the weight of factory floors humming against the songbird’s dawn, of forests cleared for yet more monoculture wheat and sugar, of rivers tainted with industrial effluent. Our colonial longing for “traditional” flavors ignores how these recipes traveled through centuries of extraction, exploitation, and displacement—how the warmth of cinnamon and chocolate carries with it histories of stolen lands and broken bodies.

Let us call it what it is: a sacrament to the gods of profit, a sacrilege to the cycles of soil and star. We consume earlier, faster, and ever more blindly, soothing collective anxiety not with true community, but with saccharine nostalgia, wrapped in plastic and exported like every other commodity ripped from this generous Earth. Even the whispered promise of vegan options or organic bliss simply cloaks the industry’s core violence in greenwashed gauze, distracting from the deeper wounds.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Let us listen for the patient wisdom of the land, honor the seeds that grow in season, rediscover plant-based practices not as trend but as ancestral memory, and slow our rituals to the heartbeat of the soil. Let the wild patience of trees and rivers heal us of our colonial cravings and capitalist fever-dreams. With tender courage, we can let holy days arrive with the winter wind, not the supermarket’s will—so the sweetness we share replenishes, instead of ravaging, the world we love.