Dear Harry & David,

Please stop sending me your catalogues.

I do not need a box of pears, and neither does anyone else I know.

Because you know why? Because I can buy pears in the grocery store. Anyone can. And even if I want individually hand-polished precious overpriced pears, which I don’t, I can go to Whole Foods and get them there. They’re in the produce department right next to the individually chakra-aligned strawberries.

Even if I lived somewhere where I didn’t have access to supermarket pears, even if I lived in a remote corner of Alaska, I don’t think, if I had my choice of things to receive via bush pilot airmail, that I would pick pears. I would probably pick tequila. And cigarettes. Oh, and sex.

You know who you remind me of, Harry & David? You remind me of my mother. And no, I don’t mean that I think you hang out at the Senior Center and sell Avon. I mean that when I was a kid, my mom would always put that giant navel orange in my Christmas stocking. She did that, even though the produce drawer in the fridge was full of navel oranges that I could pretty much help myself to whenever I wanted. That navel orange was, at first, a mystery to me. I thought that there must be something special about it, seeing as how it came from Santa and all. But when I figured out that the orange was a perennial fixture, it was no longer special, and I would unceremoniously return my Christmas orange to the produce drawer so that it would not go bad. Gradually, over the years of course I began to resent the orange. Because if the orange wasn’t there, I figured, then maybe better, rarer, and more expensive things could take its place.

I mean that, Harry & David, you seem like a product of another age, an age like one that my mother lived in the indoor plumbing-free wilds of rural America. An age when all fruit was precious, and a navel orange from Florida must have seemed like a small, fragrant, sticky Christmas miracle.

But these days, in the days of organic heirloom peaches available mere minutes from my front door all year round, getting your catalogue in the mail is pretty much like getting that giant navel orange in my stocking. It’s sweet, but it’s filler. And we all three know it.