Pumpkins, Peaches, and Personal Preferences

I’m not sure when exactly Pumpkin Spice Latte season became a thing, but I think it was sometime between my time in high school and my time in college. I missed the rise of that particular epoch, most likely by having my nose buried deeply into some book or another. By the time I raised my head and blinked blearily to gaze once again upon the real world, I was surrounded by PSL love, and PSL-love backlash, and memes both for PSL-love and PSL-love-backlash. Suddenly, something as innocuous as a flavored latte had become a line in the sand. Were you an eye-rolling, misogynist who couldn’t let people enjoy things, or were you a basic, entitled, white girl whose love of something objectively inane had corporations far and wide catering to her for no less than three months of the year? I was both. Or neither. Or possibly some inexplicable combination of the two. After repeatedly being asked to articulate my feelings toward pumpkin spice lattes, I looked deep, deep inside myself. The realization I made was this:

I really love peach milkshakes.

Now that may sound like an evasion or a non-sequitur. But it’s really not. At least not to my mind. And I’ll explain by a long metaphor that may also feel like a non-sequitur, but I really don’t think it is. The way I see it is this - Pumpkin Spice Lattes are the Christmas of seasonal beverages, and Peach Milkshakes are the Thanksgiving.

Now, I like Christmas. It’s a good time, and objectively one of the better holidays. There’s nothing really wrong with Christmas itself. It’s just that everything surrounding Christmas kind of sucks. The insane pressure for it to be the most wonderful time of the year, and the gross commercialization that starts in freaking October, and the very-special-episodes of TV, and the people who think loving Christmas is a personality, and the people who hate the people who love Christmas. You can’t simply enjoy looking at the pretty lights and attending a candlelight Christmas Eve service and spending time with your friends and family. Christmas can’t ever be just Christmas.

But Thanksgiving? Nobody really gives a crap about Thanksgiving. Sure, there’s some minor stress over how to prepare an eighteen pound turkey so it won’t leave everyone with a case of salmonella. But other than that? People celebrate how they want. You want to toss the football around in the front yard? Go for it. You want to marathon the Macy Parade and the AKC dog show? No one’s gonna stop you. You want to donate to Indigenous charities or volunteer at a soup kitchen? That’s lovely! Thanksgiving is the most mellow of all holidays, which allows for people to just enjoy it for what it is.

I already mentioned how PSL season has much of the same kind of obnoxious Discourse™ around it that Christmas does. But Peach Milkshake season shares Thanksgiving’s relaxed nature, so much so that I didn’t even clue in to the fact that Peach Milkshakes were also a seasonal event until this year.

For the last several years I’ve waited with bated breath for Chic-fil-A to drop their peach milkshakes. It’s one of my favorite parts of summer. (Most parts of summer are my favorite parts of summer, so it’s an exhaustive list, but still, Chic-fil-A’s peach milkshakes are most definitely on that list.) However, this year, I also had the chance to enjoy Whataburger’s peaches and cream milkshake, which surpassed my expectations and was truly a delight, and Andy’s peach concrete, which would have benefited from a larger peach to ice cream ratio but was still delicious. While in Alabama for a friend’s wedding, I made a pit stop at a local independent coffee shop and purchased a scoop of their peach gelato, which ended up being one of the most scrumptious things to ever grace my taste buds.

Is peach as omnipresent in the summer as pumpkin spice is in the fall? No. And I think that lack of exposure is what boosts peaches in my regard. The other day, when I was at lunch with friends and I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed peach season this year, one of my friends remarked that they didn’t even know peach season was a thing. And that made me happy. Which is probably messed up, because it is stupid to not like something because lots of other people like it, and it’s super dumb to like something because not a whole lot of other people like it. What can I say? Sometimes I’m super dumb.

Peaches' relative lack of popularity isn’t the only reason I prefer it to its autumnal counterpart. The fact is, I’d happily eat a peach. I have no desire to eat a spoonful of pumpkin spice. (I know that’s not a one to one comparison. People eat fruit, they don’t normally eat spices on their own. You get the point I'm making here, so don’t be pedantic. It’s unbecoming.) I genuinely like the flavor of peaches. It would just be disingenuous to say that all the cultural accoutrement doesn’t also factor into my overall enjoyment of the seasonal treats.

As we now enter fall, I find I’m surprisingly excited about the coming season. I’m enjoying the crisper air and that I can finally wear my office-appropriate cardigans outside without melting. I’m looking forward to bonfires and flannel and drinking hot beverages. I’m sure at some point over the coming months I will eat or drink something pumpkin-spice-flavored. But I was sad to see the peaches leave, and I look forward to their return next year.