Christmas

From the L.A. Times

By Thanksgiving weekend, the prep work was well underway. All year long she'd been saving the boxes from stationery and from her nylon stockings, stashed with the Christmas ornaments. She'd made lists in her perfectly inscrutable handwriting. In our basement refrigerator, she had squirreled away some of the raspberry jam she made during the summer.

So every fall, when my mom told us that she'd grown tired of the whole idea of Christmas cookies and was giving them up, she didn't mean it. We were never sure, though. And we'd whine on cue, begging her to please at least make the kind we just couldn't live without -- for me, the Russian tea cakes, for my brother, the spice cookies called pepparkakor.

But most of her work went on in secret, while we were at school or after we'd gone to bed.

And by Christmas Eve, we'd have maybe 100 dozen cookies, as many as 20 varieties of exquisite, painstakingly formed cookies, stored in our freezer.

As a small child, bringing out box after box of cookies that morning was kind of a miracle. Not quite as wonderful as Santa, who would get a plate of them that night, but part of the blur of a holiday full of magic and surprise.

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I grew up singing Bach hymns before dinner.  We were all terrible singers, but it didn’t matter:  my mother trained us to sing in parts.  Children, adults and even teenage boys would toil our way through “Now Thank We All Our God.”  My mother wasn’t interested in musical quality, but in the virtues of complexity and genius.     

My mother, Carol Bly, is a writer, and it was always enormously clear to us that the focus of her passionate life was her study – no June Cleaver, she merely tolerated the kitchen.  She had started her married life with no knowledge of cooking whatsoever, doggedly making her way through The Joy of Cooking, which combined the dubious pleasures of simplicity with – well – simplicity.  She made the Joy’s recipes a bit more complex by eschewing white sugar and white flour and sprinkling wheat germ where possible.  The goal was not an aesthetic one, any more than our Bach choral performances were.

But during Christmas she would put aside her battered Joy of Cooking and take out that homage to fine cuisine, Julia Child’s 1967 Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  She had the same two-volume set as did Julie Powell’s mother, with a cover, in Powell’s description, “spangled with tomato-colored fleurs-de-lys.”  In Julie & Julia, Powell calls the recipes “incantatory.”  They were that, and fiendishly difficult too.  Perfect, from my mother’s point-of-view, for important days.  For a normal dinner, we might eat spaghetti, but Christmas had to be marked by true effort and a gesture toward culinary genius.