Making Christmas Treats
Forcing the holiday cheer, and a little extra.
I received no holiday cards this year.
My fault, really. It’s not as if I sent any out. That’s the fucked up part, isn’t it? You have to give to receive. All the spontaneity and automation of childhood is truly an illusion that thins the farther you move away from being a kid. Now I have to participate in the holidays. I have to put something into it to get something out.
Aside from the decorations in the stores that begin in early November and the songs that play on the radio and the little decorations that remind me that time is passing, there’s nothing automatic about Christmas. It arrives, certainly, but aside from the cold there’s nothing that heralds the holidays aside from all that people put into it. We give and we receive. That’s the whole fucking point of this.
It’s been, uh, a little difficult to get into the holidays. Back in September I made a vow to myself to meditate on the moment, to do everything I could to ensure that my favorite time of the year—Autumn—lasted as long as possible. And despite my best, I wasn’t able to add a single minute to the calendar. I watched horror movies and Over the Garden Wall and made mulled cider and took brisk walks in the park and mentally commented on how beautiful the leaves looked. Halloween came and went. It’s December now.
With less than a week until Christmas, let’s just say I’m struggling to find the ethereal, vulnerable, yuletide spirit. Like time, it’s falling through my hands like fine sand, and no matter how much I piss and moan and struggle I can’t keep it here (and do I want to?). I’ve shopped and wrapped presents. While I prep for the holidays, doing my best to keep my family close and love them, rewatching my favorite Christmas movies and listening to alternative versions of classic songs, children and families are dying on the other side of the world. My EBT card ran out of money halfway through the month because I spent most of it on stocking stuffers which leaves me nothing left to buy ingredients for Christmas dinner. The holidays are here. Unimaginable cruelties surround us. I put on Vegas Vacation and laugh at the antics of Chevy Chase, and even that makes me sad, because there’s nothing more complex than a bitter artist who gave up on life halfway through. I understand.
Brown Butter Espresso Chip Cookies (With Toffee Pieces)
178 g browned butter
220 g brown sugar
67 g white sugar
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
210 g flour
1 oz espresso/old coffee (more to preference)
1/2 tsp baking soda
As much toffee pieces as you want to add
Bake in 350 F oven for 11 minutes
Rewatch episodes 1-3 of the Bear while baking off the batch, especially if it’s a double batch. Think about how incredible the writing in the first episode is.
I decided to make some Christmas treats.
Nothing fancy, just some cookies and little chocolate pretzels. It’s the effort, really. It’s December 17 and I feel as far away from cheer as I can. My family shrinks by the year. I can count my friends on one hand. As a thirty-five-year-old who is probably never going to have children, all of this is vanishing. As a jobless professional, I have no working family to trade Secret Santa with. But I want to make some Christmas treats.
Last year, I went to the local Dollar Store and found four gift boxes. They were cardboard, flimsy, and they looked like tiny mailboxes. They were cute. I baked treats and put those treats in little bags and stuffed the mailboxes and put names on them. I delivered them all, minus one. A couple of our good friends, who live about forty-five minutes away, never received their mailbox. It’s the holiday season and for some reason, forty-five minutes feels like a lot, even though it isn’t. I think about that a lot—about how I don’t see my friends enough, I don’t tell people I love them enough, and one day the people who are forty-five minutes away will be hours away, and I’ll make an excuse then, too. Because this is adulthood right? Everyone’s busy. Busy.
Lemon Cheesecake Cookies
For the filling:
170 g cream cheese
38 g white sugar
5 g lemon zest
mix together and freeze in little balls
For the cookies:
218 g flour
1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
168 g butter
165 g brown sugar
50 g white sugar
2 egg yolks
1 tsp bourbon vanilla
25 g lemon zest or 1 oz lemon juice
Bake at 350 for 12 minutes, cookies will set when fully cooled
Rewatch episodes 4-6 of the Bear while baking, especially if you made a double batch. Get emotional.
You’d think, during this time of the year, that all of us would be more open to a little warmth.
Maybe things are changing. I can’t be the only one that’s noticed the planetary shift post-Covid, how everyone is a little angrier, a little shorter, a little more miserable. Perhaps that’s where the busy really sets in—all I have to do is check Instagram to see that half the people I know are enduring some kind of pressure, some travesty, and there it is again, busy. The older we get, the more travesty comes knocking on our door. Maybe one day you realize that things just aren’t what you thought. Maybe your family is reduced in numbers by no fault of your own. Maybe you don’t talk to your dad anymore. Maybe you can’t.
Over the course of two afternoons, I decided to make Christmas treats. This is some forced holiday spirit, isn’t it? No mailboxes this time—no, I went to the Dollar Store and found cute little tins and stuffed little bags of treats in those tins and it wasn’t until after I bought four of them that I took a step back and really asked myself who the fuck am I even giving these to? I baked browned butter espresso toffee chip cookies, lemon cheesecake stuffed sugar cookies, blueberry yogurt dipped pretzels, and peanut butter chocolate dipped pretzel sticks coated in Butterfinger shards. I placed each of the sets of treats in a little festive bag and artfully arranged those bags in the tins, cushioning them within a nest of shredded paper, and I closed the lids. I haven’t addressed them yet.
Dipped Pretzels
a bag of chocolate chips or half a bar of melting chocolate/candy coating
cream
for flavor, such as blueberry, add blueberry preserves to white chocolate or vanilla candy coating
melt in a double boiler
coat the pretzel pieces or sticks and let them set in the freezer for 1 hour
(before they are set, you can decorate the chocolate with crushed candy, such as Butterfinger)
Listen to part of Michelle Zauner’s audiobook Crying In H-Mart while dipping pretzels and fall into a distressed emotional state over family and loss.
It can feel like things are falling apart.
I trick myself at the seams by engaging in the repetition of things that make me happy—namely, art. It’s funny. You can only watch the same bad Christmas movies so many times before you really began to criticize how deplorable they are, but even the shittiest Christmas movie becomes this thing you dearly look forward to when the last time you watched it was 365 days ago. All of a sudden, it’s more than watching a Christmas movie. It’s making cocoa and sitting cross-legged on the couch with your partner on one side and your sibling on the other side and momentarily reminding yourself that even though this world is an abjectly cruel place and we are only forestalling the inevitable with our shitty little traditions, it feels worth it right at that moment. I can be depressed out of my mind but when there’s a warm mug in my hands and I’m watching Will Ferrell pretend to be an adult elf, I don’t want to end things. Not right there. Not yet.
I worry about my brother. I worry about all the people pretending they’re fine on the outside and miserable on the inside when all of us could have better lives if we were just a little more honest. I worry that I don’t have the stones to finally leave social media entirely. I worry that maybe things can’t get better—won’t get better.
Call the Christmas treats an act of meditation. A decision. I cook a lot, I bake seldomly. Half the time, I don’t know why I do anything at all. There is a primordial human force somewhere deep within my guts that coals like a snake and rises invisibly into the ether to connect me to millions of other people doing the same thing (though they are conditionally better at the pretending part than I am). I make my treats and I wrap some presents and I watch a Christmas movie, and maybe somewhere else in there, I try to reenact older traditions that seemed so easy when I was a child, and now seem impossibly hard. There’s something about packing little Christmas boxes by hand that feels like poetry. Like I’ve got it better than Tiny Tim and George Bailey, but only because I’ve decided that perhaps it is a wonderful life after all. I don’t yet want to throw myself off the bridge into the cold water, because I have Christmas treats to give to one of my only friends tomorrow. And maybe he will enjoy them. That’s enough, right?
This is often how I view the act of writing. I don’t know why I do it, I don’t know what the value of it is, but the sheer act of the performance feels greater than myself. It’s as though I’m being guided by my own mythical force, a heightened version of me who knows better guiding my hand, telling me to sit down and work on a chapter, because maybe sometime in the future this deliberate act will mean something and I’ll be thankful for the time spent.
There’s always a reason to celebrate the holidays, a reason to keep going. We have to make it up now, because the darkness has sharp edges, and it’s getting closer, and the lights just don’t twinkle as brightly as they did before. They’re tiny fireflies, no longer lighthouses. I can’t see through the fog but I remember what Christmas cookies taste like and I figure that maybe sometime down the line things could get better, even if I’m singing the same carols and watching the same movies and drinking the same cocoa, because maybe all those little things combined are the time machine I’ve needed, creating a throughline back to the last time that I was truly happy.
Actually, these cookies taste pretty good.
Maybe I can make the most of it. Happy holidays.