Food: Old-Fashioned Holiday Cookies

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Old-Fashioned Holiday Cookies
Saturday, November 19, 2005

I glanced at the calendar the other day and was shocked at how close the Holiday Season was. It seems to sneak up on me faster and faster each year, and I'm just not sure why! But there it is. Thanksgiving is next week, and Christmas is just a month after that. There are five short weeks to cram in all of the holiday festivities. It's time to bake Christmas cookies!

Now, you have to understand what a production the Christmas Cookie Tradition is in this household. The children are now teens, but they insist on continuing the process just like they did when they were very small. It really speaks about the power and necessity of family traditions. They are an important core of our holiday even now that the children are starting to think about leaving home, and I have no doubt in my mind that they will continue the same traditions in their households once they start them.

This particular tradition involves an obscure cookie recipe that my mother always made for us kids as we were growing up. Everyone has seen the beautifully decorated iced sugar cookies that grace tables and parties at this time of year. The festive shapes include stars, bells, trees, and maybe angels, Santas, and stockings. The red, yellow, and green icing and colored sugar make them a treat to the eye before you even take a bite, and most people just love to see them and eat them. They remind us of Christmases gone by and our own childhoods, I suppose.

But never, ever have I seen the kind of cookies that my mom made all those years ago and that I now make with my children. They never seem to show up at Christmas gatherings unless we bring them, and when others taste them, they are amazed at how unusual they are. Instead of a traditional cut out sugar cookie recipe, we bake a delicious honey-lemon sugar cookie. They are soft and very sweet, with a distinct honey flavor complemented by a hint of lemon tang. The icing is also lemon-flavored, instead of the traditional vanilla. And the only reason I can think of for the rarity of these cookies is that the recipe is from an old cookbook that my mother received when she got married. This particular recipe was not transferred into the newer editions of the book, and seems to have been lost somewhere in the intervening forty or fifty years.

The cookies are fun to make, though I often find myself doing the "work" part alone these days as the kids are off on other holiday pursuits. Like most sugar cookies, you make up a thick, heavy dough and chill it for several hours at least. You roll the dough out and use the cookie cutters to make the festive shapes. Bake them to a golden brown and fill the house with the smell of warm honey and lemon. To this day, that scent puts me in the Christmas spirit! The cookies need to cool in stacks to keep them flat and smooth. And once they are cooled, the fun begins.

At our house, it's the process of icing these little gems that seems to bring out the best in the children. We gather up the powdered sugar (a LOT of powdered sugar), the food coloring and lemon extract, and just a smidge of water to mix up a huge bowlful of white icing. Then the fun begins. The creamy white icing is scooped into smaller bowls as the kids speculate about how much of each color they are going to want for their artistic endeavors. And we don't limit ourselves to the traditional red, yellow, and green. That would be boring, according the experts in the house. We make blue, orange, purple, brown, and even a charcoal-looking black when we're feeling ambitious. And it's the rare cookie that escapes with just one color of icing. Most are detailed works of art involving a base color that is allowed to dry a bit, then decorated with detailed drops of other colors of icing. The trees sprout colorful decorations and garland. The reindeer end up with red or black bridles. The small houses have roofs and windows and doors and sometimes even Christmas lights. Every cookie is painstakingly and lovingly dressed for the season, and the end result is a cacaphony of color on each plate of cookies that we serve or take to donate to a church dinner. And in case you are wondering, you can use toothpicks to apply those teensy dabs of color that allow such intricate detail.

So after an afternoon's worth of work, the family ends up with tray upon tray of festive cookies. More importantly, however, the family has also added yet another fun Christmas memory to the store that will sustain all of us through the years to come. The cookies may only last for a few days, but the memories are the most important part of the whole process. And here's my suggestion to you: Look through some old cookbooks or even antique ones and find a unique cookie recipe that you can call your own. Make the process of baking it important to your family and loved ones. You'll not only fill their tummies, but you will also be strengthening their souls.

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