Yellow. Pink. Orange. Red. Green. A dash of glitter with stars. This seems like the perfect addition to your scoop of ice cream on a warm spring day— until you take a bite. The stars are a lot crunchier than expected, a fear of cracking a tooth emerges. Not only is the crunch unsettling, but there is a dry after-taste of food dye, and you begin to wonder if this was really a good decision after all. 

This nuisance or luxury predicament has often crossed my mind, especially when I’m decorating cookies. Because who doesn’t want a little fun pazazz added to their elephant-shaped sugar cookie, right?! I pondered this as I sat at my kitchen table this Christmas decorating a pan of sugar cookies my brother just handed me for Christmas Eve. As I accessorized the cookie, I added more and more sprinkles thinking that the snowman needed a top hat and the heart needed a pretty border with some pearls. I then went to grab a jar of beautifully looking rainbow sprinkles, but as I began to pour they rolled right off the powdery dough onto the cold metal pan. I continued to grab them and attempted to place them back on the dough. They rolled off once again. This is when it hit me: when these cookies come out of the oven, will I really even go for the ones with the sprinkles or will I want the ones with visible golden dough? The answer, for me, is the dough. After all this labor of decorating and cleaning up the sprinkles that fall into mysterious places, I want to eat the cookies with the least amount of sprinkles.

Sprinkles are indeed a beautiful luxury, but it comes at a cost. For they can make messes and ruin the tastes of an otherwise delicious sweet. This brought me to the conclusion that not everything in life needs to be extravagant just like the golden dough that can often go unappreciated.