The marathon or...

Christmas baking.

It has started, the annual baking marathon.  Every year at some point I feel the need to make Christmas Cookies: this year it was today.

I grew up in a family where baking was something that happened every week at least once, my mother although a dietitian, hadn’t learned that sugar was evil and even if we didn’t have a dessert with every meal, we always had cinnamon rolls on the weekend – usually Saturdays – and waffles or pancakes slathered in brown sugar and syrup on Sundays. For our birthdays we got to actually chose our cake from her repertoire (I still have the little booklet) and we not only had our mother, but also our Aunt, her younger sister.

She was single, a surgical nurse and lived most of our young lives not more than a mile away.  Come Christmas she started the cookie baking early and on Christmas Eve we had no limits – my mother, astonishingly enough as she was rather strict otherwise – never made any comment: it was understood that we were allowed as many as we wanted and if that led to some of us getting upset stomachs, we still loved it and never would have said stop.

I have obviously carried this particular trait over into my own life – much prefer baking to cooking and Christmas is mine: even if as a family we were often either in the USA or in Germany, I still baked cookies. One famous year when the older son was 2 we lived in an apartment in between selling the first house and moving into the second and I could only make a very limited amount due to lack of freezer space.

Imagine my astonishment when I went to make up the Christmas Eve platter to find only 20 left!

Husband and son had known that there weren’t too many hiding places – I actually pulled rank that year and

had what I wanted before allowing them more.

In 8 hours I managed to produce two types of cookies and the Christmas cakes. Now for the clean up: a much less attractive task. 

It won’t be the end of the cookie baking, but I have made a dent in my yearly marathon.