Christmas Cookies Not Quite Like Grandma Used to Make
Just some Christmas cookies I found at the Food Network, with a recipe that is neither Grandma’s nor the one I use, but I’m sure it’s pretty good too.
I’m getting really close to almost starting a bit of Christmas baking. First up will be gingerbread cookies with royal icing, which Grandma (my mother’s mother) used to bake. Although I remember seeing the yellowed magazine clipping that was Grandma’s treasured recipe, I don’t know what happened to it, so I have a newer version I found online, which is pretty much the same, probably, as far as I can tell.
Grandma would have been long done with all her Christmas baking by now. She also finished her Christmas shopping well before Black Friday. In October or early November, she would walk the three miles downtown to Dayton’s, the venerable Minneapolis department store, complete all of her Christmas shopping in one go, arrange to have everything delivered, and walk back home.
Photo of Dayton’s holiday boxes swiped from Lavender magazine.
In those days (up to the 1970s), department stores provided free holiday-themed boxes, so Grandma didn’t even have to wrap gifts, leaving more time for elaborate and extensive preparation of cookies and quick breads, homemade caramels, peanut brittle, and more. Imagine a bakery and candy store combined and you get a sense of the spread she brought out after a very filling Christmas dinner.
And all of it was perfect.
Once she was in her 80s, she began to slow down. She owned the four-unit brick apartment building where she lived, and so my parents moved out of their suburban home sometime in the 1980s and moved into one of the apartments so they could help her out as needed. It had two bedrooms, and soon they took in a man from their church who was going through a bit of a hard time; Mike helped them out in whatever ways he could, and he was generally good company for the short time he stayed with them.
One year, Grandma announced that she wasn’t going to make gingerbread cookies anymore. It was just too much work, she said. She probably said that she wasn’t going to make the other things, either, but the gingerbread cookies were always Mom’s favorites, so Mom cheerfully accepted the challenge to make the iconic treats herself.
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time Mom made them, but, as she told me later, they turned out kind of odd looking. Something about the way she made the royal icing was different—it had peaks like a meringue, instead of lying flat and smooth on the cutouts the way Grandma’s always did. Or maybe the cookies got a bit skewed as she transferred the sticky dough to the baking sheet.
Mike returned home from work as Mom was finishing up, and they both had a good laugh at her funny-looking gingerbread cookies. Grandma came across the hall at that moment, and after seeing the two of them laughing at Mom’s cookies, went back to her own kitchen and proceeded to make a batch of perfect gingerbread cookies.
When Mom related the story to me afterward, I couldn’t tell which she thought was funnier—her own misshapen cookies or the fact that they drove her mother to find the energy after all to make perfect ones.