For all our neighbors we gave them home grown and home baked Zucchini bread and to some others homemade sweet potato pie. They appreciated that more than any purchased gifts .... wicked bread and pie. If you apply inflation to the given retail sales, they are actually less, much less than the last couple of years. More importantly, the post Christmas returns haven’t started yet. If they are anything like past years, it will drive sales down another couple of percentage points. The MSM administration pimps made a gigantic deal about the great increase in sales, starting out at 8 - 10% increase after Thanksgiving. I didn’t believe it just because of the half empty parking lots at the mall, Walmart, and the other major stores. We ended up buying durable gifts for the family and spent significantly less than in previous years.
I LOVE sweet potato pie, it will make you throw rocks at pumpkin pie (which I never really cared for.)
My first taste of of it was 1981... A dear, sweet black lady I used to work with brought one in to work. I’ve worked over the years to come up with a really good one, with a coconut-graham cracker crust.