Food: A Different Christmas Tradition

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A Different Christmas Tradition
Saturday, December 03, 2005

When two people get married, they often find that they have very different traditions. Holiday traditions, especially, can be quite varied from family to family, and most are closely held and very important. This was certainly true when my husband and I joined to form a new family more than twenty-five years ago. That first Christmas, we both sort of assumed that we would carry on with our respective family traditions and that we both had grown up with similar fun with our parents. WRONG! This was especially apparent when we went to buy and make the traditional foods from our childhoods. My family always made Christmas cut-out cookies. We iced and sugared until the cows came home, and the cookies were ridiculously sweet and calorie laden. I gathered all of the ingredients and got ready to make "my" cookies, when my husband said, "Aren't you going to make the marzipan?"

"The what?" I asked. I'd never even heard of the stuff.

"The marzipan," he answered. "You know, the cookie dough that you can mold into shapes and paint."

I'd never heard of such a thing, but it sounded delightful and certainly something that I'd love to try. His mother graciously shared a recipe and we sat together around the kitchen table in our new home and I learned all about marzipan. What a holiday tradition! A bit of research on the side shed some light on the whole subject. Recipes for marzipan are relatively easy to find, in cookbooks and on the internet. Marzipan was originally a treat for royalty and is considered a holiday goodie in many parts of the world. And what a tradition! Can you imagine the fun for children when you combine the joy of cooking with your parents, the fun of working with dough and molding shapes, and the intrigue of painting with toothpicks?

Find your favorite marzipan recipe and mix up the dough. Now, here's where things get interesting. The dough is the consistency of soft clay, and it can be molded into all sorts of shapes. My husband's family chose to make teensy tiny fruits at Christmas time, though I have no real clue about the reason. This was "the way it is supposed to be" and that was that. But make fruits, they did.

Small balls, pressed together into triangle shpaes and painted bluish-purple with the toothpicks turned into bunches of grapes. Roll the dough into a snake-like shape, pinch the ends and bend slightly in the middle for a banana. It was a simple step to paint the banana with the yellow food coloring, but it took a master stroke to use the end of the toothpick in a delicate move to make the lines that go up the long sides of the fruit! Roll the dough into balls and you could make either apples or oranges, depending on the color you chose for the decorations.

Over the years, we've elaborated on the tradition and changed a few details, but the children still enjoy gathering around the table to create the marzipan masterpieces as their father has done for so many years. It's one of those things that just wouldn't seem right to eliminate from our Christmas traditions, and I'm sure that each child in our family will make it a part of the traditions in their new homes as they move off to create their own families. Isn't that what it's all about?

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