Baking and Making Memories

When home begins to fill with the varied wonderful smells of baking cookies, Christmas memories come flooding back.

It starts in late November with the peppernuts and springerlies. Old fashioned cookies that need time to harden before you dunk them in your coffee. As a non-coffee drinker, I don’t enjoy those cookies very much, though warm peppernuts fresh out of the oven are very good for the seven and a half minutes they are soft and chewy.

As Christmas grows closer, a greater variety of cookies arrive. White mice, or Russian tea cakes, are guaranteed to cover your shirt with a thin dusting of powdered sugar. Almond bark pretzels are always a great treat to have around when you want a quick handful of something. There are several cookies based on the theme of chocolate and peanut butter.

Last year I rediscovered an old favorite: snowflake mix. When digging through an old box full of cookbooks and recipe cards, there was the recipe for this delicious cereal, white chocolate, and peppermint M&Ms mix.

The last cookies made are the sugar cookies. Delicious, but prone to drying out faster than the others, they also need a lot of work to decorate them all. And so our tradition on Christmas Eve eve (the evening of the 23rd) to sit down as a family and decorate the cookies together. Even as adults, I still compete with my sister to see who can decorate the most cookies.

In the end, the cookies taste good, but what we really remember is everything around them: Time spent with family while baking the cookies together. Sharing the cookies with friends at a party. Passing on an old family recipe to the next generation.

As you eat your cookies and celebrate this year, stop and enjoy the little moments. They may be next year’s cherished memories.