holiday traditions (guest post)

I originally wrote this as a guest post for Lizzie and Isiah’s wonderful blog titled Love Your Way, but that blog doesn’t exist anymore and IN FACT the domain has been overtaken by some type of pr0n. Isn’t the internet wonderful? So I’ve reproduced it here on my blog yet backdated it to when it was originally published, like some type of witchcraft. Anyway! Here it is!

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When I think of the holidays, I think of my family’s holiday traditions. Yes, I understand this is unusual, but try to stay with me here.

I remember a lot of candles at Christmas throughout my youth. I think that regardless of any religious roots you might have, candles during the holidays are pretty much a given. I was raised Catholic, and so our tradition centered on the advent wreath: a simple wreath with four candles anchored in each of four corners — three purple, one pink. Every Sunday in the month before Christmas, a new candle would be lit and prayers would be read from a tiny book. Honestly, I remember this wreath less for the religious lessons and more for the time my dad used it to show me that if I kept moving my hand back and forth quickly, I could stick it right in the advent candle flame without burning myself. Playing with fire, yeah. I’m sure that’s a key page in the holiday parenting handbook.

I think of our Christmas decorations, too. We had a wax angel tree topper in a spectacular burgundy velvet gown that my parents had gotten while stationed in Germany. One year, mice got into our storage boxes and chewed off part of her face and the fingers of one hand. Though slightly deformed, to this day my parents still put her atop their tree as a gentle reminder of the celestial beauty of the season and the glorious triumph of spirit and the fact that one day, mice may come and chew on your face.

In the rural farming community my dad grew up in, the reigning ritual was that everyone opened all of their gifts on Christmas Eve before heading to midnight mass. My parents gave a nod to this tradition by having us pick one gift to open on Christmas Eve, but we mostly skipped the part about the mass. Hey, I said my family was Catholic, but I never said we were particularly good or consistent about it.

What sent me scrambling down the hall in sock feet every morning from December 1^st through the 24^th was the sheer anticipation of what was waiting in my advent calendar. My mother made it herself from white, red, and green felt, handwriting the numbers on each pocket. Sometimes I’d find a quarter, sometimes a piece of candy, sometimes it was a note directing me to more notes that eventually led me to a bigger surprise, like an ornament or stuffed animal. Whatever it was, it felt like having Christmas morning for a glorious three and a half weeks straight.

But the coolest, bestest, most awesomest holiday tradition of all was the decorating of the cookies. I know what you’re thinking: “So what? Everyone decorates cookies. You slap some frosting on, maybe a few sprinkles. What’s the big deal?” Oh. Oh ho! Oh no, my friend. My family did it up right. We made it into an event. We made cookie decorating uniquely ours. I mean, you can tell by the sheer force and repetition of these italics that this was a serious endeavor in our household. Seriously awesome.

It started off typically enough. First, we made our cookies, usually the day before we planned on decorating them. My mom started making these cookies using a recipe she found in a magazine in 1983, and so it remains today. Nothing else will do. Making the cookies usually consisted of me watching my mother flour the counter and carefully roll out the dough, then I would swoop in with the cookie cutters. Our cookie cutters are the same old aluminum ones we’d used ever since I could remember: a star, a bell, a vague, lumpy profile of Santa Claus carrying a large sack, a mitten, two different kinds of Christmas trees (nutty!), a gingerbread-shaped man, and a larger, unidentifiable skinny man with a pointy head.

Once the cookies had been baked and cooled and we were ready to commence the decorating, we made hot cocoa. While the milk was heating on the stove, we laid some pieces of wax paper down on the kitchen table as a work surface and put out our collection of sprinkles, jimmies, sugars, non-pareils, and cinnamon dots. We took the frosting — either homemade or canned — separated it into four bowls, then added food coloring to make it red, blue, yellow, and green. We always reserved some white frosting for a fifth color option. Finally, when the hot cocoa was done, we made sure to hook a miniature candy cane jauntily over the edges of the mugs. You never asked why, you just did it.

Then? Then came the weirdness.

• First off, you had to take any cookies that had broken during or after baking, frost them immediately, and shove them into your mouth as quickly as possible. The break rate of cookies in my family’s house was staggering — often they appeared to crumble into pieces just by being gazed at, and failing that a quick turn of the wrist would usually produce a satisfying snap. At which point they had to be frosted and eaten, of course. Of course.
• Any cookies that actually remained intact had to be decorated in the strangest and most complicated fashion possible. As I got older, more coordinated, and more attentive to detail, the stakes got higher. Tree-shaped cookies were slathered in unrealistic color combinations, and were decorated with ornamental strands of every sprinkle available. Jimmies were used to make faces — we often riffed on variations of the classic “OHHH NOOOOO!” face from the Saturday Night Live play-doh character Mr. Bill. Star-shaped cookies were frosted like rainbows. Dramatic attempts were made at earning the award for ugliest cookie. The only rule was anything goes.
• “Mine are the best,” my dad usually bragged about two cookies in, beaming at his works in progress. This prompted a chorus of protestations. “I’m going to give mine a pink disco shirt! With sparkles!” I’d shriek in glee, grabbing an ambiguously man-shaped cookie and the yellow sugar sprinkles. “Yeah, well this is the prettiest bell in the whole world,” my mother insisted in mock earnestness, picking up her cookie and showing it off to the table. And we all agreed that it was.
• One of the man-shaped cookies had to get green frosting pants. This act was always accompanied by the annual Retelling of the Green Pants story, in which my dad recalled the time in first grade when his class was tasked with coloring an illustration of a Native American, and my dad chose the green crayon to color in his pants, and the little girl sitting next to him — this is where my mother had to interject with Wasn’t it Jeanne Goretsky? even though we all knew it was Jeanne Goretsky — yelled that she was going to tell the teacher on him because “Indians don’t have green pants!”
• Early on, I recognized the similarity between the mitten cookie and the shape of the lower peninsula of Michigan. Consequently, nearly every mitten cookie turned into an unofficial plug for the Great Lake State. I used cinnamon dots to map the locations of the major cities, and meticulously lined up sprinkles to indicate the roads to take to my grandparents’ houses. Sometimes I’d spend up to 20 minutes working on one single mitten. After admiring it for a few seconds, the “thumb” would inevitably break off, at which point I’d have no recourse but to eat it. Of course.

Now that I’m married, cookie-decorating is one of the holiday traditions from my childhood that I’m determined to take with me into my new family. The last year we visited the beau’s parents for Christmas, I made a point to gently introduce them to the concept. Though my parents still make and decorate cookies whenever I’m home for the holidays, it will never be exactly the same as it was when I was growing up — but that’s not the point. The point is to make these traditions our own.

And to have a lot of effing fun while doing it.