Look, it’s that time of year and I really felt like it needed to be said.

It may be an unpopular opinion, but it’s my opinion. I like pumpkin pie as much as the next person, and I can enjoy pumpkin (strictly in the months of October and November) in a variety of forms: soup, pie, perhaps in a savory dish like ravioli. I even enjoyed the unusual mashup of the Danish kringle with pumpkin yesterday. But, I have to draw the line. I don’t need my tea to taste like pumpkin spice, or my Oreos. Pumpkin spice, I believe, goes with actual pumpkin.

Anyway, I’m trying to get into the Halloween spirit. I need to find someone who wants to watch all the scary movies that have come out recently: The Babadook, Good Night, Mommy, The Visit. (No spoilers!) And The Man has acquired a pumpkin, which he promises to turn into a pie. Typically, I do the cooking around here, but I don’t have a lot of patience for fidgety things like pie crust, especially since I like mine gluten-free, which makes them twice as tricky. But the man is good at measuring things in a way that I am not. In fact, in his day job, he is a metrologist: a measurer of very, very small distances for very, very precise purposes. So he makes the crust. And since he’s making the crust, he can make the rest of it too while he’s at it.

So, while it seems obvious that the world disagrees with me on this, given the proliferation of weird pumpkin spice flavored things this season, and the fact that every year there are more of them in stores, I like to make a distinction. Pumpkin spice is for pumpkins, and you’ll never change my mind.