Contributing writer
When I was growing up, Christmas cookies were definitely not a part of our holiday tradition. While my mother grew up with “phefferness” and Christmas Eve at church with real candles on the tree, she came to believe that Christmas was an overwrought pagan tradition.
In the process, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, wreaths, and stockings went by the wayside along with the color red and anything else papal. This left some pretty simple trimmings for Dec. 25 — a small nativity set on the fireplace mantle and presents wrapped at the last minute while my sister and I did the dishes on Christmas Eve.
You can therefore predict that as soon as my sister and I reached adulthood that Christmas with all its trimmings (with a capital T) became part of our Christmas tradition. We love Christmas trees, lights, and bright colored paper packages with big bows, elves, stockings, Santa Claus, and Christmas cookies.
And surprises! We love Christmas surprises. When we were growing up, my mother usually planned our Christmas gifts and Dad could never keep them secret. He would offer us hints and talk about present possibilities. Mom would try to keep him quiet, but between her hiding skills and his need to tell, we usually had it all figured out — I so wanted to be surprised.
This year, I decided early on that we were going to, for sure, do Christmas cookies — even though we are watching our sugar intake so that our immune system stays strong and our britches fit. However, I came across this delightful recipe book at Marion City Library and decided to bring it home to tempt my sister into a cooking mood.
She looked at it, but it took a month of rechecking the book before she actually nibbled the bait
“You want to make cookies on Saturday?” she asked a couple of weeks ago.
Did I? I had already purchased $50 worth of chocolate chips, vanilla chips, big chips, mini chips, brown sugar, white sugar, flour and more flour, sprinkles, and frosting.
I’d also made a list of about 20 cookies that I’d “like to try” and whenever we sisters agreed, we started stirring up cookies.
We made cherry chocolate chews, raspberry ribbons, macadamia melt-a-ways, and came up for air the first night as I struggled with some chocolate dipping concoction for pretzels that did not work! Scrap that, just melt some almond bark.
The next night, we tried sugar cookie snowmen (my favorite) with dough dyed bright colors with professional-sounding paste food coloring (Jess had this somewhere in her stash of cooking regalia). That same night Jess attempted to make frosting for our Anise Stars and used too much tint so we had K-State purple frosting that was still intense after I diluted it with pounds of powdered sugar. We threw the stuff out, called our cousin Janet in Lawrence for advice and tried again.
I saved one of those bright purple cookies to give to a K-State fanatic that I know. You can imagine my disappointment when after 24 hours that cookie was bright blue, instead of purple — something to do with the lemon juice, I think, or cookie karma.
We were on a roll, though, with or without frosting. We made cherry nut icebox cookies, peppermint candy canes, mint surprises, cream cheese swirl brownies, gingerbread men and women, cherry coconut snowballs, triple chocolate chip cookies, and apricot crescents.
While Jess stirred, I ran for more supplies — at least three times my original investment, plus tins, boxes, cellophane paper, and ribbon. There are splatters on every cupboard in my kitchen, the floor is a mess even though I cleaned up every night, the table and counters are covered with cookies, and there’s some we forgot in the freezer. We’re having so much fun.
Four packages went out in the mail yesterday, several were delivered around town, and I finally took the recipe book back to the library … with a sampling of all the cookies we made for the librarians. Penance.
It’s a very Merry Christmas on another day in the country. You’d better bake some cookies.