Traditions

PHOTO: Mary van Balen
One tradition I never have difficulty keeping is having last minute preparations to do on Christmas Eve. Try as I might, I am never quite ready by December 24. This year I am close, though. Today I decided to bake more cookies than I had originally intended to make.

My daughter was in the dining room, sewing away. Christmas music sung by Cambridge College’s King’s Choir played in the background. (We both missed other CD’s that are packed away or given to someone else. The Cambridge choir is technically perfect, but as my daughter said, lacks energy and enthusiasm. Eventually we turned it off.)

I pulled out my standard Christmas recipes, handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me. Ginger snaps were the first. As I worked in mom’s kitchen I remembered decades of Christmases when the house filled with sweet spicy smells of ginger cookies baking. I don’t think a more tasty breakfast exists than one of ginger snaps and tea.

This batch was the best I have made since moving back. “The oven was used to Grandma,” my daughter said. “It was HER oven and resented someone else. I guess it’s getting used to you.”

I can’t imagine how many cookies mom and my grandma Becky made over the years. As I moved through the room, washed loads of dishes, and scooped flour and sugar from her spun aluminum canisters, I could hear their voices, feel their presence.

Next came pecan balls. I used a food processor instead of the old glass nut grinder. As a child, I looked forward to grinding pecans. I think most of us as well as our children, liked feeding whole nuts into the grinder, turning the handle, and seeing the glass jar filling up with bits of pecans. Food processors are faster, but not as much fun.

Finally, my daughter and I began our Christmas ritual. I don’t remember when we began to make springerle cookies, but she and I have baked them for years. One must have the “anise gene” to enjoy them, and we do. One year, after struggling to pry sticky dough out of wooden molds carved with lovely designs, we hit on a non-traditional but efficient way of making the cookies.

“They could be round, instead of rectangular,” I said. My daughter agreed and we began using a biscuit cutter and ceramic cookie stamps. We have the routine down and turn out a hundred and fifty cookies in half the time we used to take. Still, mixing, rolling, cutting, and stamping late at night, can be daunting.

“It’s what we do,” my daughter said when I told her how tired I was and that I wouldn’t have done it alone. “We make springerles every year.”

Another tradition. Something that binds generations together, that gives us a sense of rootedness and belonging. Becky and Mom, and my daughter, and me. We were all in that kitchen, celebrating the holidays and making memories that are as sweet as the cookies.
© 2010 Mary van Balen