goedendag Campers (that's hello in Dutch, except for the campers part!). So here we are 6 days before Christmas day. Am I organized??? Not....Are you??? I hope so! As I've always done since I was a little girl I always wait for the week before Christmas to bake my Christmas cookies. Never any sooner because we liked nice fresh cookies. When my Mom and Dad were both alive we baked around 12 difference kinds of cookies, doubling and tripling the batches. That didn't even include the breads, candy and homemade Scottish Shortbread we made. You never left our house without a package of cookies! I spend most of the time fending my father off the cookies as he wasn't allowed to have any of the Christmas cookies until Christmas Eve....we used to make him eat oreo's! Needless to say it didn't make him happy, so then he got to eat the "accidents"! The cookies that broke etc. I always made sure I "broke" a good many for him cause he was getting cranky on the oreo's! The year my Mother, her best friend Evelyn and Evelyn's sister in-law Yvonne took up candy making was interesting. We had chocolate covered cherries and pecan turtles coming out our eyes! Talk about sugar plum dancing in your head we all had one heck of a sugar high going on! I fondly remember as I grew older coming home from work and baking with my mother. Now I must remind you I LOVE TO BAKE...but not so much after working 10 hours in an office! We never used a mixer or a blender to do our cookies they were all mixed by hand (I still have the calluses!), We had this one lovely little cookie that was a jelly star, you made a sugar cutout cookie of a star and on one of the stars you cut a hole in the middle and you iced the bottom cookie with grape jelly and put the star with the hole on top and sprinkles with powdered sugar....now these were really good and very time consuming. They were also very very delicate. You broke the cookie that had the hole cut out you were off balance. One very busy Saturday before Christmas I was baking a pan of "The little bastards" as I liked to call them when for some reason I slipped on the floor and bam down went and entire pan of "little bastards". There were "little bastards" everywhere and me sitting in the middle of them. I was really tired as we were doing what I like to refer to as "commando baking", only the strong survive. I sat there half on the kitchen floor and half in the hallway and I cried, so what wasn't broken was cried on! My Mother was in the other room decorating cookies and her hands were full so my Dad came to see what had happened. I told him I had a whole pan of rejects for him and proceeded to sob. Dad didn't think he'd like that batch so much what with the tears streaming onto them and the ones I was sitting on he thought he's pass. He helped me stand up and brushed me off and took me into the living room. Now mind you I was old at this point I must have been in my 30's. Mum, Dad and I had a discussion about how if you had to give a cookie and name that had nothing to do with Christmas and sounded less than appealing it was time to stop making those cookies and cut back on the baking! It was agreed...we'd cut back and no more "little bastards"!. Now I must admit I did have a detox period. My sisters used to call me Pammy Bakker, they said I was the illegitimate child of Jim Bakker and Betty Crocker and that at the end of the Christmas season I had to be sent to cookie rehab to uncurl my fingers from around a cookie sheet! Now that Mum and Dad are both gone I don't bake near as much and I don't enjoy it the way I did. I always honor my Dad by making his mothers Scottish Shortbread recipe, you know you are special if you receive a cake of this from me! I make a few different kinds that Danny likes and I try to make one recipe from my childhood baking past. I still bake the breads as gifts and I've toned the candy down to homemade Carmel's. I still enjoy it, but I much more enjoy eating other peoples Christmas cookies! I look forward to my Aunt Marybelle's cookies as there are things that she bakes like we did but also wonderful Italian cookies. After Daddy died it wasn't the same as I had no one to fend off the cookies until Christmas. My Mom left me two days after Christmas three years ago this 27th. I didn't bake at all that year as she had a heart attack on December 2nd. Our last Christmas was spent in the hospital with her. We opened her presents for her and we opened our presents from her (which I had bought trying to keep normalcy). When Evelyn's son Greg was a little boy he had bought her a gift of scented dresser paper and that was one thing she had wanted. I made sure I had lovely lavender one's for her. It really made her happy cause there was nothing like good smelling undies (doesn't sound so good when written!) She wanted a taste of my Aunt Marybelle's cookies (I can't even remember which one) but she did have it. We stayed for a few hours but she couldn't stay awake and asked us to please go home and rest as it had been a long month. Grudging I left her. We checked on her several times during the day and wanted to go back in the evening but she was way too tired to have anyone come be with her. I cried and cried because I knew my childhood was gone. Two day's later Mum left me, everyone told me how wonderful it was that she went home to be with the lord at Christmas, I didn't feel it as I was just sad she left me at Christmas. Now as I look back I can see the poetic justice of dying at Christmas. The holidays haven't been easy since she left. Cookies aren't the same, shopping is not the same, wrapping presents are not the same...but now Danny and I have started our own traditions. They are just as wonderful. Dan has made my life and my holidays complete and full. I think my random thought for the day is that it doesn't have to be the same to be good. Honor the past but live for the present and enjoy every moment of it because someday you might be someones Christmas memory. I do have a fun fact for Christmas for you....Did you know Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer was a marketing campaign started by Montgomery Wards in the 1930's?? So until the 30's I wanna know who was "guiding that sleigh by night"???? Late at night I've been having cravings for broken cookies and those damn "little bastards"...who knows maybe this will be the year I attempt them again. I wish all of you and my usual 4 1/2 a very Merry Christmas. And remember, it's not all about cookies and presents. Feliz Navidad!!
xoxox Pammy
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