“I don’t want to make cookies. I don’t want to, I don’t want to,” I yell from the kitchen, where I am rolling out dough.
“Why are you making them?” my husband asks–as if there’s any choice when it comes to Christmas.
It’s my mother’s fault. She didn’t want to make them either. Especially the year that my father insisted on a huge tin for each floor of the hospital where he had just begun practicing. Mom already had 5 kids at the time, and was doing the books for my father’s new practice, but she made them. Hundreds of rolled out, cut out, decorated Christmas cookies. And fudge. And bark. That was her last year. After that she turned it over to me. I was thrilled. I was 17.
A decade later, they had become a burden; and because my mother continued to have children–numbers 6, 7 and 8–I was still making cookies with them every Christmas–mixing the butter and sugar and vanilla; rolling out the dough; cutting each shape, decorating each tray.
30 something years later, I’m still making cookies, by myself. I don’t have any daughters to take over. Not a one. My mother always told me that I was too no nonsense for daughters. Thanks a lot Mom.
Kelly Salasin, December 18, 2011
To read more about my middle-aged struggle with Christmas, click below:
Two Owls Calling 