Overcrowded freezers and pink candy canes. For me, their special once-a-year appearance each December announces the presence of Christmas. For some, Christmas can only arrive after the first great snow; for others, the combined scent of the sharp, piney evergreen tree and warm gingerbread cookies fresh from the oven ushers the dawn of the holiday season. Food always seems to play a central role in wintertime celebrations in some way or another, whether Kwanza festivities are not complete without a favorite aunt's signature dish or the new year fails to dawn until the champagne begins to flow.
Considering how greatly we disregard traditional Thanksgiving customs, my family possesses a surprising number of rituals for the Christmas season. Because I spend my holiday in Alabama, classic marks of the winter holidays - like cold, frost-filled air and icicle-adorned roofs - never surface, so I, like most Southerners, rely heavily upon familiar smells and tastes to signal the season's arrival. As a child, I would eagerly anticipate the first week of December, when my mother and I would plan the baked goods we would prepare for friends and neighbors that year. The planning session held no real purpose, however, because we baked the same cookies every year: Rice Krispie treats molded into Christmas shapes, star-, candy cane- and angel-shaped sugar cookies with colored frosting, shortbread and chocolate fudge. Yet we continued to sit at the kitchen table each year and pretend to debate the menu, creating our shopping list, I think mostly since neither my mother nor I wanted to let go of the long-observed ritual. We felt that everything should remain the same; more than that, it had to.
And for years, our family Christmas rituals went utterly unchanged. We made the same treats. We ate far too much batter and frosting as we prepared the baked goods and without fail suffered from sugar-induced bouts of nausea and stomachaches. We received a ham from the same family with a mixture of appreciation and dread, for we had to rearrange our freezer entirely to make room for the large, foil-wrapped package. We ate vegetable soup on Christmas Eve after attending the church service. We ate a midday brunch consisting of the enormous ham, fresh fruit and breakfast casserole after opening presents Christmas Day.
Then my brother Taylor and I went to college and the traditions inevitably changed.
A friend once told me that she heard that people enjoy traditions because they seem to cause time to stand still, freezing treasured moments. I think we do cling so tightly to rituals and insist that we execute them with the exact precision which we exercised in past years so that we convince ourselves that we are in control of our lives and of our futures. After all, why was it truly so important that my family's Christmas Eve meal consist of soup and bread rather than of barbecue, and why did I so intensely lament that my mother and I no longer baked Rice Krispie treats - which I did not particularly even like - for the neighbors anymore? Why did I refuse to acknowledge that with the passing of time came change?
But time does not stand still. Neither does life. Rituals do not bring back lost loved ones or erase the maturation and independence brought from years away at college or diminish the effects of aging experienced by elderly family members. After I left for college, my mother and I stopped baking together because I did not return home from school until just before Christmas, and we had turkey instead of brunch for Christmas dinner last year at my grandmother's insistence. During my first few Christmases without the familiar traditions, I longed to make and eat too many frosting-laden sugar cookies, even though I had complained in the past that the pink- and white-striped candy cane cookies never looked as they should since my mother never used enough food coloring to tint the frosting red. I desperately craved the pink candy canes after they were gone. I had made dark chocolate peppermint bark for Christmas gifts this year, and although I now actually far prefer chocolate to sugar cookies, I felt a rush of sadness. Things were undeniably different.
Holding on can be a wonderful thing, but so can remaining open to change. Yes, many of my Christmas traditions have evolved during the past few years, but as certain rituals have disappeared, new ones have been established. Much to the delight of my grandparents, brother and father, I have channeled my energies once used for frosting cookies to make an apple pie for Christmas dinner the last few seasons. We eat Christmas Eve dinner before church rather than after, and our stomachs do not growl in hunger during the singing of Silent Night. Now, instead of frantically scrambling to find room in the freezer for the tremendous ham, my mother reserves a space right after Thanksgiving so that we are ready for the annual arrival. Yet somehow that never quite works out as hoped. Each year the ham still proves too large and my mother must entirely empty and rearrange the freezer's contents to create enough room. I suppose some things will always remain the same.
Pink Candy Canes\nThe much-anticipated recipe for my childhood tradition (actually ridiculously simple).
1 log refrigerated sugar cookie dough\n1 can white frosting\nRed, blue, yellow and green food colorings
Roll the dough out and cut into candy cane shapes with cookie cutter. Bake according to package directions. Cool on wire rack. Meanwhile, tint white frosting with desired colors. Frost the cooled cookies.\n\nEmily's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at e.rowell@cavalierdaily.com.
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