Let me apologize for the Holiday Recipe Page.  My recipe for Zesty Holiday Jello should not have said “…add 1 cup of Polar King brand antifreeze.”  True, automobile antifreeze does have a “festive green color” and “sweet taste”, as well as a powerful alcoholic kick.  But the month I spent working for Minnesota Poison Control should have taught me that antifreeze contains the potent neurotoxin Ethylene Glycol.  Thankfully, many readers caught the mistake and emailed me.  Due to their quick response many tragedies were averted.

Readers also pointed out that Ethylene Glycol has a chemical structure similar to Ethyl Polystyrene, the flammable ingredient in napalm.  My “stove-top” directions for boiling the jello didn’t take that into account.  Again, my apologies.  If your Thanksgiving or Christmas gathering was marred by a kitchen fire, I feel terrible about that.

Worse still, I included additional directions for heating the jello for an hour in a pressure cooker set on “high”.  The resulting spectacular detonation caused structural damage to many a reader’s kitchen.  Phrases like “the Very Fires of Hell whipsawed through our home” and “helplessly watched as a 24 pound frozen turkey became a deadly missile” were emailed to me.  Again, sorry.  Even afterwards, people were amazed at the velocities reached by objects that had rested near the cooking jello.  Entire christmas trees that flew outside and speared through parked cars, cans of cranberry sauce or yams that vanished off kitchen counters and were found miles away embedded in nursing home roofs and church steeples.

It was after this point that things took a decided turn for the worse.  Distracted by kitchen fires and hurtling kitchenware, people left their beloved pets unattended.  Let me point out that at Minnesota Poison Control I only took calls about *human* poisoning.  True, I should have known that antifreeze causes liver failure in people.  I can’t be expected to know the range of neurotoxicologic problems that it causes in dogs and cats.  “Homicidal psychosis” being the chief complaint.  This is just temporary side effect, and most animals recovered fully.  That is of little solace to the poor readers who battled kitchen fires, unaware that their pets were lapping up spilled antifreeze, and who then bundled their pets and family into a car or minivan to escape the inferno. Locked in a crowded minivan, driving toward the fire station at 100 m.p.h., is perhaps the worst time to have a beloved cat or dog spring into a homicidal frenzy.  Apologies.