Borderline Cookies
This is the officially sanctioned Christmas Cookie Season. I mean, those making cookies before Thanksgiving were pushing it, but now, well, cookie madness is here. The baking displays fill supermarkets, even stores that don’t traditionally market foods. I’m almost afraid I’ll wander into an auto parts store (not that I’m prone to do that any time soon) and find an aisle filled with walnuts, those gross candied fruits, coconut flakes, chocolate chips, and pallets of flour, next to transmission fluid or brake pads.
I think we associate the Christmas cookies with nostalgia. Certainly the advertisements prey on our feelings of what every American kitchen should be filled with: smells of holiday goodness, and every grandma cheerfully helping the kiddies put the Kisses on top of the peanut blossoms.
As a child, I remember my mother making Christmas cookies. I don’t know if it was a terribly joyful experience for Mom. We would wail we never had enough cookies, or that those boring bells and stars she insisted on making for the cutouts were not as fun as the complex snowman holding a broom or the candy canes or little reindeer. My brother and sister like their cutouts to be thick. Mom and I are partial to the crunchier, thinner cookies. My father just plain likes them, any style.
Mom would make what I think are the big three of Christmas cookies: the peanut blossoms, cutouts, and the teacakes. Some people make ethnic favorites and other types, but I think Mom stuck to three kinds, because any more would put her in the hospital with stress after a Saturday or Sunday afternoon with her children. To this day, I get excited to eat one of my friend’s seven-layer bars that she makes for Christmas, chocolate crinkles, or those little peanut butter cookies with the peanut butter cups in them. But nothing beats the big three.
Mom had two cookbooks that she used. The master was the Betty Crocker Cookie Book that I think we got her in 1976, for Christmas. Colorful with pictures of all kinds of cookies on the cover, it contained the recipes for the peanut blossoms, the Russian Teacakes (also called Mexican Wedding Cakes), date pinwheels, and spritz cookies. We begged Mom to make spritz because they looked so cool and had neat shapes and hardware to boot. She eventually relented but warned us they were disgusting. I don’t think it was the dough; it was the cookie itself. If you look high up on one of her shelves, I’d bet cash money the spritz set is still in its original 1970s-era packaging. I see the cookies now in stores and shiver. The second book was at Betty Crocker Cookbook she was given as a wedding present, in 1961. It too, had tons of cookies, but not the colorful photos the “newer” cookbook had.
The sugar cookie recipe was on an index card in her crowded and unorganized recipe box. She’d always manage to find it and we’d wait patiently for the dough to be made and chilled. Rolling them was a tricky deal; they had to be the right temperature and just enough flour on the rolling pin and table. We’d twiddle about, fighting over who got to make the boring bells and stars, whilst trying to sneak in a few of the oddball cookie cutter shapes (Scottie dogs, anyone?). Mom would scold us for wasting time, since the dough was getting too warm.
Making the frosting was fun, too. We’d get to make a few colors and then add our sprinkles on the cookies. Then Mom would do something totally heinous: she’d put them in an airtight container and spirit them away from us. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she’d get out cookies, on occasion, for us. Dad seemed to get the lion’s share, in his lunch box or at night, after supper, he’d be munching on a cookie while reading the paper.
When my niece and nephew were old enough to stand on chairs and demand to make cutouts, I discovered the boring stars and bells made the easiest cookies that didn’t break, compared to trees, Santa, snowmen, the fragile candy canes and even the weird Scottie dogs. We’d make three colors of frosting, and maybe add a batch of blue if they behaved. My niece was more interested in eating the sprinkles, and my nephew diligently worked at plastering the cookies with whatever didn’t enter into his sister’s mouth. Mom would buy us green and red sugar sprinkles for sensible cookie decorating when we were children. We bought wild colors of blues, pinks, and yellows as well as shapes of snowflakes, holly leaves, pigs, stars and moons, and let the kids run wild with sprinkle abandon.
Making peanut blossoms usually meant policing how many Kisses they actually unwrapped and put in a bowl, versus what went into their mouths. My nephew won the eating contest, with chocolate smeared everywhere while trying to deny he ever ate a single one. When we finished rolling the Russian Teacakes in powdered sugar, the kids looked like a scary conglomeration of sprinkles, frosting, food coloring, and chocolate, with a white dusting. They looked nothing like the little, clean, eager smiling beavers on the television commercials.
Those are funny and good holiday memories, even if we popped a few aspirin after they left. Looking back at our childhoods, we were blessed with a mom who tolerated our shenanigans and took the time to indulge us in something that we thought was a right, but really was a privilege. Many times, sadly, I run into folks my age whose parents or grandparents didn’t make Christmas cookies and don’t see the need to even attempt to make them with their kids, or can’t find the time.
However, I’d like to think that my niece and nephew will be generation leaders as those who do know how to make a peanut blossom, how many times to roll a teacake in powdered sugar, make their own frosting, and know what temperature is just right to roll cutouts. They can carry on the great cookie-making tradition, keeping those pallets of flour right where they belong: in the middle of the produce aisle, next to the store-made boxes of spritz cookies.