One season following another....

It's been a satisfying day. There's a chill in the air and we had our annual Cookie Day today in our kitchen with ALL children and grandchildren present! It's one of those events where the prep and the cleanup take three times as long as the event itself, but that's compensated for by the smiles and the green tongues and the hugs. Now it's all been swept up, mopped up, scrubbed up, washed up...the house is (relatively) quiet again, and we have mounds of treats completely devoid of any nutritional value but chock-full of comfort and memories.

Tradition is a lovely thing (I hear the Fiddler in the background....), one that seems to weave one generation to the next as clearly as it connects this year to last. Saturday I thought about this a lot as I followed my mother's treasured sugar cookie recipe, mixing up six times the original amount. A lot of work, yes, but also a metaphor for the way the joy and the memories have increased exponentially in the nearly fifty years since I first tasted (and later helped decorate) these gems. And now, for my children and my grandchildren, nothing else tastes quite so much like Christmas.

It may be a long time before all eleven of my grandchildren are in my kitchen for a Cookie Day, but I hope they take the memories and the tradition to their own kitchens, next year and well into the millennium.

Thanks, Mom.