For Christmas, my dad bought the family a jigsaw puzzle map of the world. Early in the day, everything was cleared off the coffee table in my parents’ little downtown condo, and the four Stintons set to work assembling the 600 pieces into the earth’s countries, continents, and the majestic factoids floating on its oceans.

It was a daylong project, undertaken by one or two of us at a time, while the rest of us took breaks trying on our new clothes, flipping through our new books, and eating.

I noticed that, despite all the snacking I was doing, I still felt an aching longing in my stomach. It felt like hunger. It was not hunger. It was lust.

The calories you eat on a marathon Christmas binge are empty. Chocolates, caramels, jellybeans, candy canes. They do something similar to what food does – enter your mouth and vanish – but instead of satisfying you they just create a void that you address with more caramels because that’s what’s within reach.

So by the time dinner rolled around, despite my having swallowed my weight in crap, I was famished. I craved legitimate sustenance like never before. Have you known what it is like to passionately ogle a dish of roasted parsnips?

I do. Oh, I do.

• • •

My family is very English. The four surnames leading up to me – my grandparents’ last names – are Stinton, Whittle, Fielding, and Botting. It sounds like a law firm in a Dickens novel. So Christmas Day dinner is always “Merry Roast Beef,” served in thick slabs, with gradations from crispy, caramelized outer surface to plump, pink interior. On the side: Yorkshire puddings. Gravy. Horseradish to singe your nose hairs. This year’s feast was perfection, and we ate mightily.

Wine? Yes. There was wine.

And dessert. Some weeks earlier, my dad jokingly suggested I make individual-sized molten chocolate cakes. I laughed off the suggestion, but the laughter stopped when I found online, randomly, a recipe for individual-sized molten chocolate cakes.

I thought such cakes – filled with chocolaty magma interiors that ooze forth onto the plate when freed by your fork – were some kind of industry secret. What sort of nuclear technology would a person have to master to suspend a liquid core inside a chocolate cake? How many great dessert chefs have met with horrifying, delicious deaths attempting to master this invention?

It turns out, it’s just not fully cooked.

If you leave a molten cake in the oven too long, it bakes through, and you have a standard-issue chocolate cake. The secret is to remove it from the oven when its exterior is baked and its interior is still warm batter.

Armed with four brand-new Martha Stewart custard cups, I set to work making raw cakes to feed my family. I topped each serving with some Artesa chocolate cabernet wine sauce and a dollop of coffee ice cream.

Numb with food, we lifted the forks to our mouths. We contemplated the chocolate smears on our plates for a moment, then returned to the coffee table to continue shaping the planet.

• • •

The weather was so mild in Chicago on Christmas Day that my parents had the balcony door open, and still it was uncomfortably warm. The heat and the close quarters augmented the languor brought on by my gluttony, and my budding wine headache was magnified by the time spent arching my neck over the coffee table.

Everywhere I looked, something reminded me of my overindulgence. In the kitchen, a pot filled with gravy. By the couch, a dish full of pistachios. On the coffee table, a puzzle piece reading “Turkey.” Searching for something to distract myself, I lugged my stomach around the living room like a sack of quarters.

With each wave of nausea, I worried I’d have to tear open the shutters and throw up the sash.

Finally, sometime in the late evening, I made the call: I needed to go home. I needed a few hours of unconsciousness, and my family was showing no signs of turning in for the night. I packed my Christmas haul, and my dad gave me a lift. Western Africa and the Atlantic Ocean would have to take shape without me.

• • •

Usually, I curse how chilly my apartment gets in the winter. But this was just what I needed. I lay in bed and felt the cool air leech the feverish warmth off my body. I drifted off to sleep and expressly forbade visions of sugarplums to dance in my head.