Holiday Cookie saga

Is everyone baking their holiday favorites? Are your mom’s cookies something you wait all year for? Are your family’s recipes the best?

Ours are! I hope yours are too! I love cookies. I’ve always been a fan of holiday baking. Maybe it’s the variety, maybe it’s the specialness of a once a year treat. Maybe it’s the tradition thing. Maybe it’s all of it. The coziness of a warm kitchen, sweet buttery smells and the fun of a little extra flair. Stirring love and detail into batch after batch of deliciousness.

On this stormy late December morning, nothing sounds better than baking to me. I’m loving the howling wind and pouring rain. The swaying tangled tree branches poking through the fog. It’s conspiring, out there, for me to insert a little romance into a non romantic time. Am I crazy to feel some big gratitude for this New England storm?

My kids will tell you that I’m not wrong. Our Christmas cookies are all pretty spectacular. Dark spicy gingerbread men and women, (of course). I decorate with butter icing for the loops and buttons. I also do hearts and snow flakes with butter icing details. (I know royal frosting is more the norm for gingerbread, but butter compliments the molassesy ginger flavors better, though we are a butter loving family, so a bit biased…

Auntie Eva’s jam thumbprints come next. This recipe dates back to my earliest childhood holiday memories. The days when they only aired special Christmas shows once per season. This meant if you visited the wrong family on the night ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ aired, you could miss it. Tragically, to us children, for the whole year! Luckily, Auntie Eva, who was not an actual relative, had a ton of kids. The last two around my brother and my ages. She baked hundreds of cookies all the time and we could sample as many as we wanted while watching any of our Xmas favs. Hopefully, when our parents’ visiting schedule led us there, it would be a night with two specials, like Charlie Brown AND Rudolf!

Her thumbprints have to be made in small batches. No one has ever had luck doubling her recipe for some reason. For the jam centers only the best homemade of course. A million years ago, I bottled jam from fruit I picked myself. Does anyone still do that? I often included a pretty little jar as a neighbor gift with a plate of cookies.

Next up: sugar cut outs. My sugar cookies are unique because I add cardamom. It’s a nod to my family’s Nordic roots. There’s a braided holiday bread made with Cardamom which I’ve never made, but my kids were born loving the spice. Truly, these are an elevated version of sugar cookies. Thick butter frosting and flakes of sprinkle colors with a light hand. No one needs colored sugar to over take things..

Whipped shortbread is easy. I loved it with the red and green fruitcake cherries that have fallen out of favor since I grew up. My kids weren’t fans, so I substituted red and green MnMs. I was the last of the fruitcake generation.Holiday fruitcake was mocked and made fun of until it disappeared some time in the eighties. I think the bakers of that confection have either passed or retired from baking. I admit I had a weirdly wide palette as a kid, so I was one of the few of my generation who secretly liked it. RIP fruitcake. Another holiday tradition bites the dust.

Chocolate chip, because my old recipe was the best…

Sometimes I’d make that toffee with chocolate broken into odd shapes, you know the one. If you time it wrong the toffee sticks to your teeth, but made correctly it’s pretty divine.

And finally, Magic bars! Remember those? Who doesn’t like the combination of chocolate, pecans, and coconut, on buttery graham cracker crust? I made my own sweetened condensed milk, because, well, you really don’t have to, but again, only the best for the holidays…

I’m a sucker for beautifuly displayed cookies. Every year covers of magazines are adorned with artistically decorated and arranged plates or boxes of holiday cookies. Every year I am reinspired.

I know it’s a lot of work! I know I know, who cares about cookies anymore? My old traditions have pretty much all fallen off the roof (like the Tavias fiddler). Its really ok. There is no one in my world at the moment who will appreciate real butter and carefully sourced ingredients. My little cookie monsters all grew up and I’m miles and miles away. It happens.

I’m just indulging in some nostalgia here, because why not?! No one didn’t like baking at my house!

My old baking season spanned the entire month of December. I baked and froze each cookie batch separately. My kids hung out, watching and helping and sampling until they got bored and drifted off to watch one of the holiday specials I had loved as a kid. I later added Little Women and the Muppets version of a Christmas Carol which stuck surprisingly to the actual story by Charles Dickens. Michael Cane does a great job acting along side a cast of mostly puppets. In my defense I was always about trying to get my kids to appreciate great classic art and literature. So thanks Jim for making that movie.

Little Women is well… ummm I guess needs a little explaning perhaps.. My kids, mostly boys, and all grown up, will tell you that the opening music to the eighties version of Little Women says Christmas to us all. This movie has a lot of young stars at the start of their fame, so that’s fun. It’s a good true to the story version. The art direction is on point. The details are all lovely, and several years of holiday scenes are portrayed. The music is amazing, but some online versions seem to exclude all the Christmas songs, which is kind of the point, so you would normally find us baking to the actual movie playing in the background. We have it memorized. Thats was our thing. I have some darling pics of my youngest granddaughter intently watching Little Women and later, Its a Wonderful Life. Just proving that you are never too young to appreciate the classics!

Or cookies! I miss those sweet old times. I have had the privilege of baking with my grands off and on for years. I’m grateful they all humor me and stream a holiday show and even try to watch one of those dated, old stop action ones, when I’m visiting.

My son put on the Muppets Christmas Carol last visit and we took a little trip down memory lane. Even though muppets are a hated thing, (who knew?!) sorry not sorry. It turns out it’s nice to have a two year old, without an opinion, as an excuse to watch silly old holiday programs

and bake…

My attic veiw, I couldn’t capture the wild winds in the photo, but clearly it’s rainy