Swiss Cheese Ornament

A cheese ornament this specific has to earn its spot on the tree, and the Swiss Cheese Ornament does it with hand-painted glass holes rendered accurately enough that people genuinely ask why the holes are there at all. The honest answer involves bacteria producing carbon dioxide during aging, a fact that redirects roughly sixty percent of dinner-party conversations the moment it's deployed and completely stalls out the other forty. One particular kind of person always knows the actual reason behind the small, strange detail everyone else has stopped noticing entirely, and they share it without being asked, right at the moment the room most needs redirecting. Hang this for that specific kind of wonderful person, the one who turns a cheese plate into a short lecture nobody minds sitting through twice. Somewhere between the Royal Ontario Museum's mineral hall and its civilizations wing there is, conceptually, room for a hall of lunch, and this wedge is its founding argument.