I have a favorite Christmas cookie.
Imagine that you are a nice Jewish Girl from Miami going home for your very first Christmas at the childhood home of a nice Catholic Boy from Cincinnati. Greeting you is your future mother-in-law, and she’s carrying the most delicious cookies you’ve ever tasted: the thumbprint cookies. They are buttery, they are sugary, filled with red and green frosting. They are a family tradition and they are, in a word, Christmas.
So, too, is Christmas the hours that you’ll spend in the kitchen, baking cookies together in the days that follow, talking and getting to know each other each year throughout the early years of your marriage. A decade passes and, eventually, your children join in. It goes a little slower at first as they “help.” But soon enough they become quite proficient at it and everyone looks forward to the afternoon of stirring, balling, thumbing, and icing.
These memories rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the Mall Santa Christmas of your youth until you can’t imagine doing anything else but this every single year. It’s simply not Christmas until the Thumbprint Cookies are made.
But, it’s not just my tradition, and it’s not just hers. I am pretty handy in the kitchen and have a well-organized, technology-based system of recipe planning and cooking. Anything else usually stresses me out. But this couldn’t be more different, and I couldn’t love it more.
The recipe we follow is this old, tattered, type-written sheet of paper, sandwiched now in protective plastic sheeting, that my mother-in-law chose to preserve in 1969, in the early years of her own marriage. She loved the recipe, her mother’s, and didn’t want to lose it, so committed a slew of family favorites to the page; there are about a dozen of them — Almond Crescents, Lemon Squares, Butter Balls, and Press Cookies — but the Thumbprints have always been my favorite. One day I will frame that recipe and hang it in my kitchen, and keep a little Christmas in all of us all year long.
By the way, I also have a favorite Christmas ornament which I loved talking about with Mario Lopez and Kit Hoover on Access Hollywood.
