Christmas Pleasures #1: Cookies

Nothing like baking cookies if you are feeling blue around the holidays, missing the little girls who used to adore cutting out sugar cookie stars.  Missing the days Mom and Dad wrapped you in an over-sized apron to drop the spoonsful of Toll House cookie dough on the baking sheet.  Missing my Aunt Mary who baked hundreds of dozens of fancy anise cookies every December, a fact mentioned in her obituary this summer.

The smell of cookies baking connects us to those days gone by in a fundamental, sensual way, maybe the deepest way.

Christmas cookies, the sweet, munchable pleasure best enjoyed with milk--or for the resolutely adult among us, coffee--are not the same if you buy them at the grocery store, pre-baked and packaged.  They have no smell.

For those of us whose hands are no longer up to the sifting,  mixing and rolling any more, there is an alternative: pre-mixed refrigerator cookie dough.  All that is required is slicing, baking and, for the sugar cookies, canned icing.   "Not a creature is stirring . . .," I say.  And you still get that great smell wafting all through the house.

Throughout the summer I collect cookie tins at yard sales, usually about 25 cents apiece.  The tins are square, oval, small and large, and brightly colored.  I'm preferring smaller boxes for many of the family since we are retired folks at the diabetic stage of life, and I can only in good conscience entice them into just so much sin.

Did you see the cute sugar cookies on the cover of Martha Stewart Living?  You can download the patterns of coy snowmen, snow-roofed houses, windswept gingerbread men.  I enjoy Living as much as I enjoy flipping through the travel mags--both have about equal probability of being realized in my waking life.  My daughter Rebekah, awash in that earlier stage of adult life, asked me not to renew her gift subscription.  With two little boys under five, she is discouraged by the elegant ideas she doesn't have time to realize.  The point for me at my stage of life is to enjoy floating in the fantasy.

So, I plump the boxes with gaily wrapped chocolates and truffles.  Last year I tossed in liqueur-filled candies which added interest, but I had so many left-over I am forgoing those this year.  Of course I add peppermint canes for color and top with a Christmas card and maybe a bow or an ornament.  (Hint:  Christmas cookie cutters make great ornaments.)

I especially liked my parents' special Christmas cookies:  birds' nest cookies, cream cheese circles and date pinwheels. Mom and Dad loved baking together:   cookies for the church bazaar, the PTA, relatives, neighbors, the preacher's family.

For those of you who can still manage to "stir around," here is the recipe for Mom and Dad's Date Pinwheels.  You can't buy this in the refrigerator case.

Mom & Dad's Date Pinwheels


Ingredients
1 c Shortening
1 c Brown Sugar
1 c White Sugar
3 Eggs
4 c Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1 tsp Vanilla
  1. Cream shortening and sugar, add vanilla, eggs and sifted dry ingredients.
  2. Take half of dough and roll out 1/2 in thick.
Filling
1 lb. Dates, chopped or cut up
1/2 c Water
1/2 c Sugar
1/2 c Nuts (Pecans or Walnuts, chopped)

  1. Cook dates, sugar and water until thickened.  Add nuts.
  2. Cool mixture, spread on cookie dough, roll up like jelly roll.
  3. Let stand overnight in refrigerator before baking.  
  4. Slice thin and bake 12-15 min in 350 degree oven.