It’s impossible for me to think of Christmas without thinking of my mother. Not just because I lost her three years ago today, but because she loved this holiday so very much.
My father and I would often laugh about her starting to buy Christmas presents in March, only to have completely lost them by June. If we were lucky, they turned up before the holiday but more often than not, they’d show up around the following Memorial Day the following year to be sheepishly handed over to the recipients. She and I once got into an enormous argument about a present I’d allegedly received, only to have her apologize the following April when it turned up in the back of a closet.
Earlier this week, I cranked up the iPod Holiday playlist and started making cookies for my aunt and cousin. In the past, my mother would’ve created elaborate cookie baking schedules and prepackaged ingredients for each recipe, but I was only making one kind of cookies this year – Russian Tea Cakes. Usually magic cookies, date-nut pinwheels & lemon crisps would also be on the list, but Russian Tea Cakes are their favorites and since I was shipping them south to Savannah, I decided to keep it simple. I only cried a couple of times, thinking of past Christmases with my mom while creaming butter and sugar. Looking forward to the time when I can experience those memories and be glad for those times rather than saddened by them.
These are my favorite holiday cookies, too. Once, when I was a kid, I thought these were the cookies on Grandma’s counter, but those turned out to be pfeffernusse. Ick. Those pfeffernusse turned me against molasses cookies forever.