The pumpkin vs. sweet potato battle adds a new contender: pecan. Meghan brings us a photo gallery worthy of National Pie Geographic:

Patrick asked last week for a show of hands from pecan pie people. I would have raised my hand if it wasn't already busy shoveling pecan pie into my face. When I had my fill, I went out back to document the strange and magical events that make the superlative holiday dessert possible.

You won't believe it, but it all starts when this crazy-eyed squirrel shakes a tree.

(Note: Pumpkin vs. sweet potato pie aside — as that debate is one of principle — my favorite kind of pie is apple. I have apple pie ice cream in my fridge. But I'd say pecan is my favorite nut or at least top three.)

Pumpkin Cloud is Wayne Thiebaud's cover of the New Yorker's food issue. What does it mean? "Perhaps cheery optimists will hope that the 'Pumpkin Cloud' will sprinkle extra whipped cream on the pie, in a sort of Big Rock Candy Mountain kind of fantasy, but I see nothing cheery about the image," NYer-watching Emdashes says. "Thiebaud's painting reminds me that we're never entirely free from worries." I respect this but see the cloud is an expression of taste creation.

Whatever your take, representing humanity is a credit to pumpkin pie, for sure, especially over sweet potato. But to understand the esteem, you have to understand Thiebaud's status in the dessert art world.

This is the man who painted Pies, Pies, Pies and Pie Case and so many more. From a NYT book review, "Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud, is the story of a happy man known for his happy paintings of cakes and pies." Pieces of Pumpkin got $2 million-plus at Christie's.

One artist quotes him on theory: "Color basically is a problem similar to that of size. Well, pumpkin pie color is one color, damn it, and it is an ochre with some orange in it… but when one mixes them together and puts it on a white canvas, the result looks like pudding not the color of a pumpkin pie… why? It lacks life, vitality — one must add patches of orange, of blue, of other colors, in fact, a mosaic of colors to give it some semblance of the pumpkin color one sees in reality."

Best quote from the Web? "People ask me why I don't do a nice pretty Viennese cake or spaghetti. I don't know anything about it. I'd have to be Jackson Pollock to do spaghetti." Interestingly, I can't find anything from Thiebaud, Mr. Pie-as-Art, depicting sweet potato pie. Who would he have to be to do sweet potato? A simpler-orange-loving Jim Davis?

Of course I kid. Garfield's Thanksgiving strongly endorses pumpkin pie.

In this blog's many arguments for pumpkin pie over sweet potato pie, never have I asked the preference of America — possibly because the evidence would've been too overwhelming for Randy to counter. After all, the holiday were here. But the New York Times published a slice of the country's opinion this week, and true to the surveillance journalism Randy and I helped pioneer, I can't ignore the numbers. As the Times analyzed the top 50 search terms on AllRecipes.com the day before Thanksgiving, the results were clear. America wanted a certain pie.

Screenshot:

Sweet potato casserole came first, but I've never had beef with sweet potato casserole. After pumpkin pie, did sweet potato pie come next? Only if sweet potato pie was sometimes called green bean casserole. Following on the list: pecan pie, apple pie, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, pie crust (just the crust), deviled eggs, cheesecake, mashed potatoes, pumpkin cheesecake, turkey, and then finally…

Screenshot:

It finished just ahead of mac and cheese, which I love but, let's face it, is a cute dish pajama-wearing children make all the time in minutes. If sweet potato pie wants to be taken seriously… better luck next year?

The hermit crab to which my cousin's son Andrew introduced me at the beach this year was friendly but had no name. The hermit crab was so getting ready to flip that home. In this housing market, you ask? That's what I said. Also, I learned hermit crabs are the sweet potatoes of the crab family. Likeable frauds.

Watch out! Sweet potatoes aren't real potatoes! If a strange man in a mustache offers you a sweet potato pie, run! Run away! Run as fast as you can! We all know potatoes don't have legs. But, again, sweet potatoes are not real potatoes. Who knows what they're capable of.

A month ago, Hokum wrote the following.

On my Facebook page, I recently suggested I was trying to discern the difference between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie. One person responded by saying that sweet potato pie *was* pumpkin pie, "and then it wakes up from its best dream ever."

Hardly. The real difference is that you can make a sweet potato pie from scratch with few hassles. Pumpkin pie? Not so much. Assuming you can find a sugar pumpkin for the pie (which you can't), you then have to clean out the nasty sucker, cook/steam the flesh in some manner and go from there. With sweet potato pie, you basically make mashed sweet potatoes, throw in some eggs, milk/yogurt, sugar and seasonings, mix it together and you're there. *Fresh* sweet potato pie, as a result, is the best dream ever.

You know who that sweet potato pie basher was? That was me. So, I would like to offer a brief response in this space.

As a person with a deep interest in comparative dessert studies, I do not doubt the ranking of Hokum's contribution to the spectrum of sweet potato pie. If entered against Little Suzie at the country fair, if judged on television against the likes of Bobby "Riggs of Food" Flay, Hokum would be good money. But I come to contest the pie itself.

The vegetable that drove my people from Ireland must earn each ounce of my appreciation. Start there. And fancy-pants nicknames don't help. Why kind of self-respecting pie has to praise its own taste? Apple, pumpkin and cherry pies don't have to tell you they're sweet. You know they're sweet. But this potato pie, it has to compensate. People's Republic of China, we get it, you're communists. Sweet potato pie, we get it, you're sweet. Thanks for the heads-up, boyo. Tell the fellas in market research hello.

Sweet potato pie. It's like some kind of a mid-century boxer. Or a Dick Tracy scoundrel! Or a saying of Chris Berman's forefathers, exclaimed right before they sold the kiddies on relaxing smokes and threw your wife back in the kitchen between innings to bake another damn pie.

Are you happy?

Pumpkin pie keeps no such delusions. Far from a destroyer of nations, the humble pumpkin lives to make us happy. Historians and philosophers alike credit it with the world's safety from demons as well as the regular arrival of candy. One could argue the pumpkin brings more sweetness to the world in one night than the PR-addicted potato manages all year. In popular cultures, people see the pumpkin's greatness as a symbol of God.

The potato's ties to gun culture fall short.

Consider my favorite kind of pumpkin pie, the pumpkin chiffon pie. Like some kind of Big Bopper song left aloft in the cold Iowa sky, pumpkin chiffon pie is the edible representation of punkin-chunkin orthodoxy, striving in a fallen world to make a pumpkin fly forever. We trust the pie. The pumpkin pie has never tried to kill us or mash some latke-sipping Madison Avenue stylings on our wallets and stomachs.

Sweet potato pie may be "the best dream ever," but the pie is just that — only a dream, a sweet dream, a Freudian couch potato problem. So, we must analyze. Is a dream a pie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?

Last week, there was a day when I really wanted some pie. I was sitting at my desk and suddenly felt I was in need of a delicious apple pie. A yearning. Then I came home to find Slate covering the Great American Pie Festival. In reading about pie, my yearning was peeled, cored, sliced, and sated.