2916 Dec 25^th

I’ll ignore politics today; instead I’ll reprint a piece from “More of the Same…” a book of memoir/essays I did some years ago. This one concerns my mother’s Christmas cookies; the year was about 1950:

 

Mother’s Christmas Cookies

When I was in college many years ago, my mother made very special Christmas cookies. There was a delightful variety to choose from. There were sugar cookies, toll house cookies, gingersnap cookies and molasses cookies, among others. These cookies were good cookies. When my friends came by to pick me up for our nightly study break (A break, I might add, that usually consumed the remainder of the evening.) they would leave with their mouths and pockets stuffed. Mother didn’t mind; this was a testimonial to her baking skills.

Far more important to my mother than the taste of these cookies was their appearance. These were Christmas cookies after all, and they should look like Christmas cookies. As a consequence, mother spent more time decorating the cookies than she did baking them. Indeed I believe that my grandmother did most of the baking freeing mother to spend her time decorating them. She would put little faces on the round gingersnaps to mimic Santa’s elves. There were little white candy spots for eyes with raisins just above them for eyebrows, a red cinnamon candy for the nose, little licorice strip for the mouth and white icing for the elf’s hat. There weren’t many of these on the plate. Most of the cookies had a few minimal decorations and these, more plebeian cookies were those my buddies consumed. All but one buddy that is: Harry inevitably started with one of the fancy cookies, maybe two, before he shifted to the plainer ones.

Mother also produced a super fancy cookie: this was her Santa Claus cookie. It had a molasses cookie base in the shape of Santa’s face. The red cap, eyes, nose and mouth, and the beard were all done with carefully applied colored icing. The beard had an added detail; it was made of grated coconut imbedded in the white icing. Each plate of cookies had just one Santa Claus. Of course no one ever picked the Santa cookie, no one but good old Harry, who always gobbled up a Santa cookie, and a few other cookies as well, every time he dropped by.

Mother had intended the Santa cookies as decorations. She probably would have hung one on our Christmas tree if she had thought of it. They really weren’t intended for consumption. Of course Harry didn’t know that. He was very polite and always complimented mother on how delicious her cookies were. He never mentioned their appearance, only their taste. Mother could not understand this, if the taste was all that mattered to him why did he have to pick cookies that took half an hour to decorate instead of a more plebian cookie with the same taste?

She decided on a plan to teach Harry a lesson. She made a very special Santa cookie. It looked exactly like all the other Santa cookies, but with an important difference; this Santa’s beard was not grated coconut, but grated Ivory soap. When Harry was due she switched a genuine Santa cookie for the specially doctored version. As she usually did, she asked Harry if he’d like a cookie or two. Now there was no need for him to pick the Santa cookie, there were at least a dozen other perfectly delicious cookies on that plate, but there was only one beautiful Santa Claus cookie smiling up at him.

He picked up several cookies and put them in his pocket for later, and then he picked up the Santa Claus cookie and immediately chomped down on Santa’s beard. Harry, in later life, made his living in dramatics. He taught theatre at the University level and he directed plays. He loved an audience even back then. He was deeply engrossed in some story or other about the college we both attended and he simply gulped down that cookie. At that moment he was not interested in the cookie’s taste because he had discovered that he had an unusually attentive audience, presumably, he thought, for what was coming out of his mouth, not for what was going into it. If that Ivory soap had any effect whatever on Harry, it happened much lower down in his digestive tract than it was our privilege to observe. Mother, and dad, who was also in on the Santa bit, simply stared.

If Harry knew there was something odd about that cookie, he never showed it. And he never neglected to eat the prettiest cookie on the plate every time he had the chance.

Now to complete the story: Harry and I roomed together in Pittsburgh after we graduated from the little liberal arts college we attended. Harry took an MFA in directing from what was then Carnegie Tech and I was in graduate school at Pitt. I introduced him to the Pitt graduate student who became his wife; I was best man at his wedding. No, I don’t believe he ever found out about the doctored Santa beard.

Harry subsequently became head of the theater program at the University of Mass. and then head of their fine arts division. Like many theater people Harry was a heavy smoker. He died in a one-car accident after learning that he had inoperable lung cancer.