The Fat Diaries: Fighting the Holiday Cookie Monster
I got three holiday-themed emails in my inbox this week. That in itself was nothing special, but instead of telling me that such-and-such store was offering a 15% discount or opening its doors at some ungodly hour, they were from three friends. I was asked, in order to facilitate three separate events, to drop all my plans this Sunday night and make three separate batches of Christmas cookies for Monday. Oh crap.
My first reaction (and probably my second, third, and fourth) was one of perturbed annoyance. Did these people honestly think I had nothing better to do than pretend to be Ernie the Keebler Elf for four hours? I hate baking. It’s untidy and time consuming! I have to pour over cookbooks for an easy recipe, buy ingredients, I have to lug out the mixer and painstakingly follow said recipe (which is nearly impossible for me). Some cookies require rolling and cutting out on a floured (read: incredibly messy) surface. Some require elaborate fillings. Then I have to baby-sit the oven for hours while I cook each batch, each batch of course coming out differently because of my ancient oven. Then there’s the icing and the sprinkles and whatever else that needs to go on.
I remember I once loved to make Christmas cookies with my mother. I’m still trying to figure out exactly why. I think it was because my mother loved to do it, and it showed. She was all smiles and jokes as we baked. We made little cookie men and I’d draw icing dresses and shirts on them with the colored icing she had prepared for me. We’d put on candy buttons and those delicious silver candy ball bearings (which you can’t get any more). My brothers sometimes helped but usually they just ate the cookies–baking was for sissies. She also washed all the dishes herself, since she didn’t want me to ruin her spritz press or her Pyrex mixing bowl.
I keep trying to channel this joy when confronted with the infinite possibilities of cookies. Instead I just feel tired and uninspired. I’ve pretty much given up on making cookies from scratch this year. I’m probably going to resort to my lame-ass standby of raw dough from the refrigerated section of the grocery store. Yes. I’m that lazy. If I can find the sugar cookie dough that’s already pre-cut into festive shapes I might go so far as to paint designs on them in egg yolk with food coloring added. But even then that’s a huge chunk of an otherwise restful evening for me. Putting smiley faces on 60 cookie men isn’t as fun as it was when I was eight.
And of course, back then there was no such thing as guilt. We made cookies purely so that we could eat them and eat them we did. Christmas was carte blanche time to go nuts and become a cookie monster. Parties thrown by church, school, piano teachers, family and friends were all confectionary wonderlands where anything went, and it usually went on the Santa-patterned paper plate in my hand. Even now, work parties, family parties, and school parties, and the sugar overloads therein, are part and parcel with the holiday season.
Now I’m chafing under the yoke of responsibility. I have to be the adult who smiles and lets the kids go nuts while pretending I have no desire whatsoever to do a swan dive into the pecan snowballs. It’s kind of funny to be standing there among the other moms with the same thoughts running through our heads. You can see it in their eyes–we all have the same hungry expression as we eye the mountains of brownies and chocolate thumbprints. Sadly, along with the loss of innocence over things like Santa Clause comes the loss of innocence regarding things like calories. We can no longer pretend that going nuts at holiday parties is without repercussions and won’t bite us in the butt (or the thighs) later.
This is usually where I come out with some tips for survival, but frankly I can’t think of any. I’m just going to be that extremely tired mom at the kids’ parties watching the darlings stuff their faces indiscriminately and praying that I make it without gorging. After that, it’s down to surviving the kids’ sugar high until bedtime.
Maybe I should just buy boxes of those peppermint cookies from Trader Joe’s.
