In this episode of Marriage Bites, Mike and Jess take on Cold Stone Creamery, a place that once felt like a magical marble slab spectacle and now feels like a very small room where someone reluctantly smashes ice cream behind a wall of shoe box stacked mix ins. Jess braves the store with both kids while Mike stays home, silently convinced the bill will somehow be forty dollars, and he is not wrong.

What follows is a surprisingly passionate exploration of gingerbread, complete with Mike’s on air reboot (“Mm, 50… wait, let me try that again”), a confession about building sandwich style gingerbread men using chewed cookie paste, and a dissertation on why gummy bear runoff can actually improve ice cream. Jess tries to explain nostalgia, Mike tries to explain texture, and together they try to understand how two tiny cups of ice cream cost more than a family meal at Wendy’s.

There is also a deeply marital debate about whether an ice cream month must legally include soup, and whether Cold Stone’s holiday flavor could go viral if someone, anyone, at Cold Stone actually cared.