My mother made hand-dipped chocolates every year for Christmas. Usually, she kept them separated, but sometimes she would mix them, so you'd get a variety. Cherry, maple-walnut, peanut butter, and peppermint were regulars. Every year she'd try another flavor or two.
Of course, we had home-made Needhams (chocolate dipped potato/coconut bars) every year, along with caramel corn with peanuts and other treats. We didn't get much for presents at Christmas, but my mother would scrimp and save so that we could have lots of home-made sweets over the holidays. I never gained an ounce. Shoveling the snow off the local beaver-bog and playing lots of one-on-one hockey with neighborhood kids burned all the calories that I could pack in. I always had hand-me-down skates, and one year, I had to make do with a pair of white figure skates from an older girl who'd outgrown them. Pretty interesting. After learning how to avoid full-on face plants from leaning into the toe-picks, I actually got pretty good at figure-skate hockey.
Sorry for the diversion. I have never had much of a problem with weight-gain during the winter holidays. Elevated metabolism in the cold weather combined with some activity has always kept things on an even keel. One exception was the year that a friend and I built him and his wife a house out of field-stone and mortar (and I cut, split, and stacked the ~15 cords of hardwood that it took to heat the old brick farmhouse that my wife and I rented). That weight-gain was not unwelcome. I was a bit stringy going into that winter. Donnie and I could not have weighed 250# together, soaking wet.
