My mom used to make at least six different kinds of cookies and six different kinds of candies every Christmas. And that didn’t include the fruit cake she started in September – it had to marinate in rum soaked cheesecloth for months and months, stored in a tin carefully placed on a high shelf in the cool back stairwell, before it was pronounced good enough to eat.
We lived just one town north of most of my relatives, so Christmas was a time for “visiting”. And if you visit – you have to snack on holiday treats. My mom never disappointed!
It began with Christmas cookies…
My favorites were the pecan fingers. If you have never had these – you are missing out on a delicious memory. Ground pecans mixed with powdered sugar, butter, flour and a few other ingredients mixed and shaped into logs, baked and rolled in more powdered sugar. I still make these almost every year for my own family.
Of course, she also made the holiday staple – frosted cutout cookies. Hers were a little different from the traditional sugar cookie as they had anise spice in the dough and frosting made with whipped egg whites and powdered sugar. I remember decorating what felt like hundreds of cutouts with colored sugars – carefully designing each cookie in the beginning, then just putting one color on each cookie as it passed my way and finally tossing a mixture of all the leftover colors on them as the night progressed and we started to tire of our task. Poor Mom – while we decorated she had to keep up with frosting them all! We had quite an efficient assembly line going – good thing there were a lot of us to help.
My dad’s favorites – fry pan cookies and trilbies. The common denominator for these two cookies were dates. Dad loved dates. Trilbies are a sandwich cookie made of oatmeal dough with a date filling spread in between the two cookies halves. Fry pan cookies are made on the stove top with dates, nuts, and Rice Crispies – cooked then rolled into balls and covered with coconut.
We also feasted on peanut butter cookies with the chocolate stars, thumbprints, and cream cheese spritz cookies in red, green and white with sprinkles. Somehow I ended up with my mom's original spritz cookie press and the secret recipe. Maybe I will have to give them a try this year - for old times sake!
And then there were the bars – after all, these counted as cookies, too. Seven layer bars made with coconut, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, walnuts and more; and pecan bars with melt in your mouth butter frosting were my personal favorites.
Every year she would experiment with a new cookie – some to return regularly – some never to be seen again.
And of course we had more than our share of homemade candies...
I am not talking about perfect little chocolate molds. I'm remembering divinity, heavenly fudge made with whipped cream, and white almond bark. There were mint chocolate haystacks, English toffee (the year it was undercooked and soft was the best!), and white chocolate dipped pretzels. And don't forget the chocolate covered cherries, my favorite angel food sponge candy that melted in your mouth, and chocolate-coconut drops.
It occurs to me that people just don't make homemade candies any more - but my mom was an expert.
When we were first married, I tried so hard to recreate the Christmas of my childhood. I baked dozens of cookies and created all kinds of homemade candies - more than the two of us could possibly need. So, I sent out care packages filled with cookies, candies, and love to everyone we knew. Now, I just bake whatever sweet treat I am in the mood for - no minimum requirements! Since I can't not bake something, I believe my mom may have passed on a baking gene to me...
My sister Linda and brother Gary got that baking gene, too, as their homes were always filled with lots of goodies to satisfy any sweet-tooth at Christmastime. And, lucky for my brother Ross, his wife Lil loves baking as much as the rest of us so the tradition carries on in their house, too.
I sometimes worry holiday baking has become a lost art. That is why I encouraged my daughter Kaitlyn to bake with me at a very young age. I used to sit her on the counter top and she would help stir, sample, and form the shapes of all the goodies. Something must have clicked, as she can make her way around a kitchen with the best of us!
Memories of Christmas will always include the treats my mom expertly prepared. If food is love, then we were loved in abundance.
This Christmas, I think I may need to dig out some old recipes...
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