Christmas cookies

This is the first year that I am reporting on cookie baking progress in real time, posting updates on the successes, failures, and unintended consequences of steps taken by mistake.

As a result, I find myself reflecting far more than I might otherwise on this annual ritual, which is the primary way I connect to family tradition. I say that I am making my mother's cookies. I have never been interested, as others are, in finding new recipes or in changing the recipes I received. Christmas is mom's cookies, and I am intent on re-making Christmas.

But it is more than just making the same kind of cookies as she did. When I make my mother's Christmas cookies, I repeat embodied gestures, the memories of how she did things, of how we did things together. I re-embody her. Now that, every time I look in a mirror, I have a slight shock of recognition, seeing her hair turned white surrounding my face, this sense of bringing back to life a shared experience is ever stronger.

Yesterday, when the Russian tea cakes were in the oven and I began to set up the cooling rack and confectioner's sugar for when they came out, I reached without thinking for a brown paper bag, cutting it open and laying it down on the counter to rest the cookies on, collecting the excess sugar. This is nothing I thought of; it is something I have forgotten to do in previous years; it was simply something that, in a state of exhaustion, came from somewhere deep in my being.

Similarly today, rolling walnut-sized balls of kipfel dough to return to the fridge for two or more hours, I ripped off a piece of waxed paper before I remembered that I use a plastic bag to hold the layer of balls and keep them from adhering. Finding no plastic bags left, I self-consciously pulled out the waxed paper sheet I had folded and put back, and began to line it with the kipfel cookie dough balls.

I learned these things without intent. Baking was the one thing that I did with my mother that I didn't share with other siblings. Why, I don't know. Growing up, cooking was not something I was expected to do: if there was a meal needing help, my job was to run to the store for a loaf of bread or something else needed at the last minute. I think it was when I was in high school that I began staying with Mom in the kitchen when she began to make her cookies.

The memories, like all memories, are unreliable, layered, cannot be sorted into a timeline. They are episodes. Some are funny: the year that we realized too late that weevils had infested the oats, and faced the decision: throw that entire batch of gumdrop cookies away? or keep silent and let them be consumed with a little extra protein? I associate this memory with something read as an archaeology undergrad, a similar joke made by an archaeologist studying early agriculture, and maybe that means this time was on a vacation from Cornell, because I know that after I left home, returning to make Christmas cookies became even more important.

Even when everything else changed, this did not. There were the tools: the sifter (she sifted her flour; I twitch with guilt as I do not); the pastry cutter with wires and a wood handle (now I have my own, found after a brief flirtation with a supposedly superior all-metal, bladed type); wooden spoons for creaming butter, the technique I learned from her and continue to practice, except for one batch this year when my injured elbow punished me for trying (and even so, I am not sure I will resort to the mixer again next year).

Not that nothing ever changed in her repertoire. I do not know when I realized that the big, sugar iced cut cookies we decorated as children were really not all that interesting to her. It seems she had made them so we could be part of the cooking, and once we were grown, there was no special attraction there, even though when she did decorate the reindeer, Santas, bells, and stars, she placed each sprinkle of sugar or silvery ball with perfect care.

But it was the other cookies she loved to make. And unlike me, she experimented with new varieties every year. Kipfels were one of these experiments, from a recipe printed in the newspaper. We made the rich short pastry, rolled out the circles on 10x sugar, and prepared to fill the crescents, before we reached the filling instructions calling for a combination of apricot jam, chopped walnuts, and beaten egg whites. Odd, but still, we combined these ingredients as best we could, and they were delicious. Then the paper printed a correction: there were two fillings, one apricot alone, the other a walnut mixture. After careful consideration, next year, she made her mixed filling again, walnuts and apricot jam-- and I make her version of kipfels every year, aware that it is not Lottie Ketter's recipe anymore, but mom's.

We would work for hours. This year, forced by my recalcitrant arm to delay some cookies for days, I realize that I have taken on not just the responsibility to reproduce her cookies, but the need to make them all at once, in an intense burst of effort over two or three days. It is not as hard to make the cookies this way, spaced out over a week. But there was something about the intensity of baking Christmas cookies with mom that meant this was a special time.

I have recipes for almost all the Christmas baking we did year after year. The Hello Dollies, which I think may originally have been made by an aunt (Virginia? or am I confusing this with her famous Rocky Roads?). The spectacular, universally beloved gum drop cookies (for which I scour stores in these days of Sour Gummi Worms and Fish, pushing the old traditional gum drops off the shelves). The Russian tea cakes, always my favorites, but finicky, ready to break into a million crumbs if I make the slightest mistake in assembly. (I remember the disastrous year when she experimented with an alternative way to cover them with sugar, putting them in a bag and shaking it, opening it to find crumbs and broken cookies-- why would she try that? with my own fingers beginning to show the effects of arthritis, I wonder if this was an attempt to lessen the fine work that becomes harder as my hands become clumsier, or rather, if hers became clumsier as mine are?)

And then there is Stollen. I do not have this recipe. I wonder if it is one she actually wrote down, or simply committed to memory. The German fruit bread with its white sugar icing was often the last thing she prepared. I do not remember the kids liking it; the citrons and citrus zest that accompanied the raisins in her version did not necessarily appeal to the tastes of children. I have not tried to recreate Stollen, because with one exception, it was not something I made with her, not something for which the skill is in my fingers and arms.

But there was one Christmas when I made Stollen. I don't remember when, if it was before I left home or when I returned, as I did for as long as I could, to make mom's cookies. What I do know is that timing did not work that day; we were late into Christmas morning before we wrapped up the last cookies, and she decided not to stay up to make the Stollen. I said I would clear up, and she went to bed. And then I made a Stollen. All by myself, I recreated her steps, ending with the icing, leaving the Stollen for her to see when she came downstairs next morning. My gift to her; the only gift I remember giving her in my life.

So how could I make Stollen now? I gave it to her, as she gave me these other things: the gumdrop cookies, the Russian tea cakes, the kipfels. Her hair, her despair and hope, her magical thinking. Belief. Love. Ferocious love.