Christmas cookies are food for thought ~ December 25, 1986

David Heiller

“Christmas does not end on December 25—boom, Christmas is over. Christmas ends on January first.”

Cindy sits in the next room, reading a magazine in the warmth of a wood stove and Christmas tree lights. Those are her words, spoken to a cynic with writer’s block in the kitchen. The writer can’t think of anything to write about, and it’s Christmas, for goodness sake. All he can do is sip at his cup of tea and devour a plate of cookies that he begged off his wife. He begged her not to give them to the kids’ grandparents, not all of them. Peanut-butter-on Ritz­crackers-dίpped-ίn-melted-almond-bark cookies. Give Grandma and Grandpa an embroidered hanky and shaving cream like when we were kids. Save the cookies for home.

Cookies. The man at the typewriter sits forward now, the blur lifting from his eyes like mist on a river in the winter. Cookies, he thinks as he reaches for another hunk of almond bark crackers. That’s what Christmas is all about.

On Thursday morning, the week before Christmas, my wife hopped out of bed at 4 a.m. to go downstairs and make cookies. Yes, I said hopped. Only the prospects of making cookies at Christmas time will cause Cindy to hop out of bed at 4 a.m., after five hours of sleep.

Half an hour later, our son Noah crawled into bed next to me. Ι looked at the clock—4:30. I could hear pans banging in the kitchen; smell the wood stove crackling in the living room. Ι could almost feel the warmth of the Christmas tree lights filling the dark night.

Noah is only three and a half years old, but he could hear and feel these same things. I reached over to give him a hug, but he was sitting up, looking at his mother’s empty spot, her bare pillow.

“I have to go downstairs, Daddy,” he said, sliding off the bed.

Noah's daughter, is the same age as Noah
was in this column,  and Mariah working on cookies.
The circle goes on

“Come on, Noah, don’t you want to cuddle with your dad?” I asked in a sleepy voice. Nothing tops having your son nestle with you, like two bears in a den on a cold December morning, under a heavy quilt and an electric blanket.

“No,” Noah replied, disappearing down the stairway.

While I turned back to my dreams, mother and son set up an assembly line for chocolate cookies that would fill Santa’s elves with envy, and with hunger. Cindy and the dough for the chocolate cookies all ready. Noah stood on his high chair next to her, with the very important job of rolling each round ball in a bowl of sugar.

There are many ways to roll chocolate cookie dough in a bowl of sugar. It takes a grown up about three minutes to dash out several dozen with quick, thoughtless movements. Not so with kids. That’s why no two Christmas cookies taste the same, even though we make the same kind year after year. Noah rolled each ball carefully in the sugar before setting it delicately on the cookie sheet. He demanded perfect balls, carefully rolled. If Cindy placed too many un-sugared balls before him, he told her to slow down. It confused him.

“That’s too fast Mama,” he would say. Finally they compromised, and Cindy was allowed to have two—and only two cookies waiting while Noah did the rolling.

Patience is an important ingredient in a good Christmas cookie.

With three pans going, the house was soon filled with the smell of chocolate cookies. I rolled over in bed, thanking back 30 years ago, when I was my son. I would walk upstairs to my grandma’s house. She would have cookies spread out on her kitchen table, in bowls, on the counters, in the cupboards everywhere. There were sugar cookies with colored frosting and hard silver beads that I was afraid to bite into. There was Russian tea cakes covered with a strange, sweet white powder. There was candied fruit cake, which I wouldn’t eat on a dare.

And there were chocolate cookies. Grandma made them a special way. They were thick, maybe an inch high at the center. Yet they had a heavy consistency, with almost a crust on the outside, so that to a poor kid in the 1950s, biting into one of Grandma’s chocolate cookies was about as close to a candy bar as he came all year. Chocolate cookies were my favorite.

Christmas cookie delights and family delights.

I rolled over, open my eyes, looked at the alarm clock. Six o’clock. Time to get up. I closed my eyes again. Lying in bed at Christmas time with the smell of chocolate cookies doesn’t happen every day.

Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. The steps were careful, determined steps from a boy with a mission.

Noah stopped by the bed, held out his hand. “Here Daddy,” he said.

I grabbed the chocolate cookie that he offered. It was still warm. “Thank you,” I said. I bit into the cookie. It was soft, thick, a taste all its own.

It wasn’t quite like Grandma’s. But it was every bit as good.