The Christmas Diaries, Part 8

Late afternoon sun streams in on Christmas baking fresh from the oven

Christmas Eve, December 24th

Christmas Eve.  Baking.  Obviously.

We’re hoping to get some company during the next several days, both the just-dropping-by variety and friends for dinner.  Christmas is tomorrow and I was feeling festive and decided to lean into a bit of vegan baking, something new for me.  I made Cranberry Walnut Oatmeal Spice Cookies from Vegan Planet...pretty tasty through they didn’t flatten out like cookies.  I use a cookie scoop and the second two dozen I flattened with a wet hand before baking and they looked more like you would expect of cookies, though they make me want a cup of tea when I eat them.  In keeping with the cranberry theme, and much more successful, was a Cranberry-Orange Walnut bread -- almost as wonderful as the Silver Palate’s recipe (though that one had a lot of eggs and an embarrassing amount of butter).  

On Santa Watch

Christmas is sort of soft-pedaled at our house.  I love to decorate, but don’t go crazy.  We enjoy the Christmas lights on the front porch at least as much as the few folks that will see them.  I love the music we listen to for only a couple of weeks a year.  It’s fun to be with family and friends at this festive time, be we also enjoy some solitude during these longest nights.  We’re living in our forever-more Christmas present to ourselves, the cabin, so there is (at least currently) nothing under the tree for either of us.  And that’s fine, especially since we recently gifted ourselves with a new iMac and Kindles.  We buy presents for my husband’s elementary school-aged grandsons and shoot for something that strikes us as just right, without going consumer mad.  This year it was space-themed pajamas, jigsaw puzzles, and games.  I like to think of them opening the presents from us with all the excitement Christmas morning brings to children, and hope they like what’s under the wrapping.  We also hope that before too many more Christmases have passed they’ll have opened at least the gifts from us here at the cabin.

Snow angel -- next year I'll work on technique

This afternoon we took a walk towards the meadow on the plowed dirt road.  At our turn-around point my gaze fell on an almost pristine expanse of snow, untouched except for what looked like the faint track of some small rodent.  Something from long ago triggered a memory of making snow angels.  I couldn’t quite remember exactly how to get down in the snow to create the perfect impression, but after careful consideration I decided my falling-backwards days were over, at least in snow less than three feet deep and this was half that much.  I lowered myself down, stretched out tall...feeling how strange it felt to voluntarily lay down in the snow (actually not bad at all)...and moved my arms up and down to create my wings.  It’s certainly been over 50 years since I last did that.  Some things are worth repeating as an adult; I think we appreciate their particular fun more that when all the world was nothing more than our playground.

We’d left shovels at the bottom of the drive and collected them on the way to our friends’ cabin across the lake.  They were coming in late that evening after a big family dinner and we wanted to at least break through the three foot snow berm at the foot of their driveway that the plow had kicked up.  We went on to clear enough space for them to park a car before hiking up to their cabin, which was going to be anything but easy.

Over a simple dinner of our favorite vegan chili and some yummy pumpkin biscuits (Vegan Planet), we talked about Christmases past.  We’ve the last nine of them together, but both of us have memories of Christmases when we were kids, and when our children were kids.  It was odd how little we remembered about the gifts themselves...it was so much more about the experiences -- where we were living, who was with us, family and friends.  Later we settled down in front of the radio to listen to NPR’s A Christmas Carol, narrated by Jonathan Winters.   I never get tired of that story, and never give up hope that we can all learn the important lessons of kindness and caring, and remember them all year long.

We no longer have to go through the motions of leaving cookies and milk for Santa (no wonder he’s so chubby!), but we did decide to leave our outdoor lights on for our late-arriving neighbors...a little cheer before they reached their cabin after a cold, dark hike up a steep hill in two feet of snow.