Christmas Cookies

I finally got around to baking Christmas cookies yesterday. There were any number of other things that were also on my "must do" list, but the cookies catapulted to the top. One must have one's priorities. What's the big deal about cookies, you ask? Oh, simply that, without them, it wouldn't be Christmas.

Well, okay - of course it would be Christmas, but it wouldn't feel right. Cookies are among the half a dozen or so Christmas essentials (the others being a Christmas tree of some kind, music, candles, and presents of sorts - homemade or no-cost are just as good as money-spending ones). Christmas celebrations are all about traditions, connecting with the past. So my cookies, they have history. Well, not the individual ones, of course, but the kinds of cookies I make. They're the kind my mother made, and my grandmother, and her mother, and her mother... I have some special carved cookie moulds that are over a hundred years old; they used to belong to my great-grandfather's sister-in-law. Among my cookie cutters are ones that have been in a family since at least my mother; I remember using them as a child. One of the favourites was always the little choo-choo train with coal tender and cars; we used to argue about who got to use it first. And then I added to the collection, myself - there's a little donkey cookie cutter I bought at the Christmas market in Stuttgart five years ago, and one that's a car, sort of like a new beetle, which tells you right there it's not an antique.

The thing about these recipes is that they're very specifically Christmas cookies; never, at any other time of the year, would you make these cookies. The recipes were developed to use the most special, rare ingredients - literally 'rich' recipes, because you couldn't afford them any other time. They're loaded with butter, sugar, white flour (as opposed to the coarse whole-grain flour you'd bake your bread from year-round), eggs, almonds - all foodstuffs that were carefully rationed, in the days when there was some connection between the difficulty of producing a food and its cost. (Take butter, for example: it takes about a quart of cream to make less than a pound of butter; and a lot of milk to get a quart of cream. So a recipe that calls for half a pound of butter - well, that takes huge amounts of milk to get there.) And the spices that go into Christmas cookies are almost all exotics, as far as Europeans are concerned. Vanilla, lemon and orange peel, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, star anise -   from India, China, the Spice Islands, rare and costly.

Today, all these foods are commonplace, and cheap. I eat butter every day, and white flour and sugar are so ubiquitous in our diet that it takes an effort to avoid them. As for the "exotic" spices, they tend to be cheaper and easier to get a hold of than anything that might be grown locally. But the cookies are still special, even today. Because what is rare and in short supply today is time - the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into making these things. Cutting cookies from a sheet of rolled dough takes much longer than dishing out the dough by the spoonful onto a cookie sheet, and normally, during the course of the year, I would never stand at the counter carefully brushing icing onto five dozen cinnamon stars - it takes far too long. But for Christmas, it's worth it. And the labour of making the cookies becomes part of the tradition. I have very fond memories of cookie making as a child, and my own kids now carry on in the same vein. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Life, the Universe, and Christmas Cookies. Come on over for a visit, we're happy to share!

Cookies

It has come to my attention that there's been a certain dearth of comments on my blog posts lately. I thought it was because my esteemed readers were too disgusted with my babble to deign to reply, or else overcome by a certain sense of ennui as to the topics covered. However, as it turns out, there was (perhaps still is, now) a glitch in the system, and all the great multitudes of you who have been dying to leave a comment have been prevented from doing so by technical difficulties.

Apparently the error message one is sent runs as follows: "We are sorry, but we were unable to complete your request. The following errors were found: Input error: Cookie value is null for FormRestoration". Now, what in bloomin' blazes does that mean? The only thing I can figure is that they think you've been trying to join some weight-loss site. They're telling you that if you're trying to get back your pre-pregnancy (or pre-college, or pre-marriage, or pre-learn-to-cook-real-food) figure (= "FormRestoration"), you shouldn't consume any cookies (= "Cookie value is null"). Or, perhaps, only have really worthless cookies in the house, because they taste so awful they won't present any temptation. But you know that already, don't you?

Or, perhaps, it's actually something to do with carpentry. I usually set my "Language Preferences" to "English, UK" (it's Euro snobbery, okay? You don't have to follow suit). Now, in the UK, "cookies" are known as "biscuits", I believe. And "biscuits" are also what carpenters call little round flat disks of wood which can be used to join two pieces of wood together, provided one cuts a suitably-shaped slit into those pieces first. Then you have a biscuit joint, as opposed to a mortise-and-tenon, dowel or dovetail joint. I know about those because I learned a bit of furniture-making some years ago; alas, my jointing capabilities never progressed any further than the butt joint. (Quite. You can stop snickering now.) But I read all about the other joints, so I feel qualified to pontificate thereon. (What do you mean, reading library books isn't the same as actually doing something? C'mon!) So, I conclude that the error message about the cookies was meant to say that without cookies, or, in proper Queen's English, biscuits, the joint falls apart.

Well. The fact of the matter is that some of you did still get through to my blog commenting form, if not others. (Please, please don't tell me that you haven't actually been trying. It would just be too discouraging, and destroy all my carefully cultivated illusions of how tremendously large my readership has been growing in the last couple of days, and how all of you are clamouring to leave witty and erudite contributions. Leave me my fantasies - and leave a comment while you're at it.) So, I wonder if those of you that got through have something special going on? Perhaps an immunity to cookies. You're probably also really skinny, and your favourite food is green salad without dressing. I hate you. (Oops, sorry. That's not the way to build a following, is it? Okay, I mildly dislike you. No, not even that. In fact, you're my best friend, and you can come over anytime I've baked a fresh batch of cookies. More for me. Muahahahahaaaa....)

Ahem. Okay, I pushed a few buttons in the Blogger Dashboard, and clicked "Save" a couple of times. Maybe that fixed this problem? If not, I'll have to do some calisthenics to get blogger to do something about this. Can't have these comment-less blog posts; I don't like having my cyber voice echoing in an empty space. Cookie -kie -kie -kie -kie -kie.....

Life, the universe, and cookies. Uh, biscuits. Ah, whatever.