(I've been crazy busy lately with the Thanksgiving holiday, appointments, the day job, and trying to get my holiday cards finished that I almost forgot to post something today. Please forgive the repeated post - it was originally posted on December 19, 2011, but is still just as true today.)
Everyone I know has at least one holiday tradition they look
forward to every year from Black Friday shopping to family gatherings to
attending that one special holiday party every year.
I have two traditions I look forward to. One is to watch Rudolph the Red-nosed
Reindeer. I’m well past the age of
believing in Santa Claus and flying reindeer, but it’s just not Christmas if I
don’t watch Rudolph. Every year, the
night it’s on, I get in bed, prop up my pillows, and snuggle under my big
fluffy comforter and watch the cartoon while my cat curls up at my feet. Of course, there’s always a cup of hot
chocolate involved too.
The most important tradition though is making Christmas
cookies with my mom. She started
teaching me to cook when I was four years old.
Every December we would make cut out cookies in various holiday
shapes. She would mix the dough on a
Friday evening and put it in the refrigerator over night. My brothers and sisters and I would take
turns peering into the refrigerator at the bowl of dough and asking when it
would be ready for baking.
Finally, Saturday afternoon would come and she’d pronounce
it ready. She would roll it out and
place the cutters on the dough. Each one
of my siblings and I would get a turn to push the cutters down into the
dough. My mom would peel away the
excess, put the cut out pieces onto a baking sheet and into the oven. We’d repeat the process over and over until
every scrap of dough had been formed into a cookie.
Rows and rows of angels, reindeers, snowmen, Christmas
trees, holly leaves, tree ornaments, and Santa Claus cookies would fill one end
of the table to cool then be packed away until the next day, the most important
day of all – the day we would frost them.
My mom would make the frosting and allow each one of us to
stir drops of food coloring into bowls of white icing. We’d have a rainbow of colors and little
bottles of colored sugar to decorate the cookies with. We’d spend the afternoon decorating the
cookies, making sure the Santa cookies were frosted red and white to represent
his suit, the snowmen white with a strip of yellow around his neck and down his
stomach to represent his scarf. Christmas
trees had brown frosting for the trunk and green frosting for the leaves and a
dot of yellow at the top for the star just to describe a few. When we were finished, my mom would lay them
on wax paper to set. We would ooh and ah
over them like they were the most magnificent cookies ever made.
My brothers and sisters are all married with children now and
building their own holiday traditions but for two days every December my
siblings and I gather together and make Christmas cut out cookies with my
mom. It’s a tradition I hope we’re able
to continue for many years to come.
