Holiday Goodies

Butter season. It's here. The inside of the door on my freezer holds several pounds of Land O Lakes butter. Many more of the 1-pound boxes are stacked on the shelves in my refrigerator. My holiday baking has begun.

Baking Christmas cookies is one of my favorite things in the whole world. There's nothing that puts me at peace during this crazy busy time of year like getting into the kitchen to do some baking while Christmas music plays in the background. Maybe it's because I think of the many years my mom and I baked holiday cookies together. When I make the thumbprint cookies, a family favorite for generations, I can almost hear my mom tell me to roll the little balls of cookie dough no larger than a walnut. Now I use my small portion scooper and each cookie is the exact same size. She would have loved that little tool.  We would stay up until all hours of the darkness to bake hundreds of special cookies that had become a tradition through the years.

I stll make many of the same cookies my mom and I created each holiday season. But, each year I find new ones to try. I have a stack of clipped cookie recipes that I flip through each November, pulling out a couple that will become newbies on the cookie tray. Some of those become keepers and are tucked into the "Keep Forever" file. Others are half-heartedly consumed and are never found on our holiday Christmas cookie platter again.

This Christmas especially I am wishing we could be with my Mom and Dad and sister in Delaware. But it is not to be, so I will have to make do, recreating the traditional Christmas morning breakfast we’ve cooked year after year. Popovers are the star, with scrambled eggs and scrapple on the side. Scrapple might be a bit hard to find in Massachusetts (!), but I will definitely be making my Dad’s famous popovers. Only I’m not sure which pan I’m going to use.

When I was a very little girl, my job was to stand on a stool, dip a paper towel into a can of Crisco, and grease the cast-iron muffin pan with the stuff. The Crisco kind of went by the wayside, but for some reason, that cast iron pan wound up with me, and has traveled around the Northeast for the last 25 years or so. I’m not sure how old the pan is (it’s marked “Griswold, Erie PA,” so I know for sure that it was made before 1957, when the Wagner company absorbed Griswold. But it is likely much older than that). But I think it is due a little more respect than I have given it lately.

Cecilia was a ‘10’ on a scale of one to two. She had unmitigated primal passion. Her sexual appetite was unparalleled and horizontal. It was vertical and diagonal. When I suggested to Cecilia that we spend the Fourth of July in Hawaii, she responded by giving me a fireworks show in the bedroom that went on till daybreak.

After Cecilia made my night, I made travel plans. We would first go to Hanalei Bay on the North Shore of Kauai. Then to Maui – Kaanapali Beach and Hana.

As I was packing for the trip, the phone rang. It was Cecilia. She stammered and fumfered and did everything audibly possible without actually forming words.

“What’re you trying to tell me?” I asked repeatedly.

“I can’t go,” she finally said.