My Favorite...

My favorite thing about the holiday season when I was a kid was the food. My family has a lot of terrific cooks, and we never lacked for good things to eat. However, this was the time of year when even my mom outdid herself and our cuisine went from fantastic to over-the-top. It always started with a traditional Thanksgiving, which is my favorite meal of the year, and ended with a spectacular array of finger foods artfully arranged for our annual New Year's Eve Movie Night. Stuffing and mashed potatoes with creamy gravy to start things off, and cheese ball, pickle-cream-cheese-and-ham wraps, and finger sandwiches to wrap the season up. It doesn't get much better than that.


But, best of all, was all the stuff in the middle. My mom had a special recipe box that she kept just for her Christmas goodies. Some families have sugar cookies and almond bark pretzels. We had decadent fudge, rich truffles, and delicate, hand-painted chocolate masterpieces, among many other things. The cooking started the week after Thanksgiving with my mom's chunky, aromatic, flavorful fruit cake. After chopping and measuring and mixing and baking, we wrapped each cake in rum-soaked cheesecloth and put them aside to age. While some people joked about the terror of receiving a store-bought fruit cake for Christmas, these were coveted and highly sought after gifts in our community and extended family.

The next weekend we always moved on to pumpkin bread, chocolate-cherry-thumbprints, and my great-grandmother's special oatmeal, chocolate chip, raisin cookies. Each person would be assigned a corner of the kitchen and a recipe, and we'd always end up clucking playfully at each other over who took the last stick of butter, and chuckling about how my dad could get powdered sugar on every square inch of his work area. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the warmth and smell the sweet goodness of those baking days.

Of course, there was also a lot of work involved. (It is only now, that I am a mother, that I understand how much time and energy my mom put into those endless weekends.) However, even when finances were lean, my grandfather was very ill, we had too much scheduled and not enough time to complete it all, and giggly little girls had been replaced by surly, moody teenagers, those weekends were an important tradition that we held on to, and that I will always treasure.

This year I am determined to pull out a few special recipes (most of which are the ones I loved so much as a kid) and share them with my children. I know that what I do with them will never be the same as the special time that I shared with my parents, but I want them to have great memories of us being together in the kitchen just like I had. Who knows - maybe someday it will be their favorite childhood memory of the holiday season as well.