The Dough of Life...

I don’t bake.  Wait.  Let me rephrase that.  I USUALLY don’t bake.  My kids get cookies from a package or, when I’m feeling really wild, cookies that come from dough in a tube.  Holidays include pie from the grocery store and someone else makes the birthday cakes. 

I enjoy cooking nice meals and am generally happy to try a new recipe but baking’s just never been appealing to me.  Too much precision required, I think.  If I’m expected to measure and time and possibly do math, the fun is sucked right out of it.

But there are two exceptions to my baking rule.  One:  Mom’s cut-out sugar cookies in shapes that represent the season and Two:  Grandma’s Christmas Stars.

The sugar cookies make sense.  I spent a lifetime at my mother’s side, rolling and cutting those cookies.  Then, sitting with my brothers and sisters decorating those cookies.  The decision to put the green-dyed coconut “grass" at the feet of the Easter bunnies with jellybean eggs or to leave him sans grass was a heavy one.  Did all of the reindeer cookies need a redhot candy nose, or just the one playing Rudolph?  I suspect that, on my deathbed, I will see these cookies in my memories.  Obviously, I want my kids to have those memories so I continue the tradition but the fact is that, even when I was young and single and just barely scraping by on my own, it was very important to me to make these cookies.  Sometimes I’d throw in a Snickerdoodle or Russian Teacake to the mix, but unless there were frosted stockings or Santas, there would be no Christmas in my heart.

Christmas Stars are really more of a pastry than a cookie.  They are a lightly sweet dough, filled with a cherry center, folded into a pinwheel star shape.  My Grandmother made these every Christmas.  Certainly, she made them at other times throughout the year, maybe with different filling.  But to me, they WERE Christmas.

I was fortunate, in my early years, to spend a lot of one-on-one time with my Grandmother.  With 39 grandchildren, this was not a luxury afforded to all of us and I knew that and appreciated it.  My time at her house was spent reading with her or maybe helping her with laundry in the wringer washer and clothesline, but when she was busy in the kitchen, I was usually just there to pass through to snag a sorghum cookie on my way to the toy box.  I must have seen the Christmas Star operation happening, but I honestly don’t remember it, which means I probably wasn’t a part of it.  They just magically appeared around the holidays.

Some time in my early 20s, in those very lean years when it wasn’t possible to go home for the holidays, when it wasn’t likely that I could buy presents, and when I barely knew how I’d buy groceries, it became very important to me to figure out how to make Grandma’s Christmas Stars.  Either my sister or my mother secured the recipe for me, and I dove right in.

Wow!  These things are HARD!  The dough wasn’t such a challenge.  Once I conquered the yeast process, that is.  And I knew how they were supposed to look, so after a lot of staring and studying, I finally figured out the geometry behind the folds and the proper ratio of filling to pastry.  I did it!  They were pretty, they were yummy, and most importantly, they tasted like Christmas.  So I kept baking.  And baking.  And I had enough beautiful stars to share with the beautiful stars in my life – my friends, my coworkers, and the people who mattered to me.

Over the years, with more practice, I feel as though I’ve mastered the Stars!  They’ve definitely flopped on occasion, and when that happens, it’s easy to recognize why.  I’m rushing.  I’m not tuned in to the moment.  And I’ve forgotten to invite Grandma.   There’s no question that when I’m thinking of Grandma (yes, even while she was still here on earth with us), the Stars are at their best.  When I’m rushing through it like a chore, they flop.

Really, isn’t that the answer to everything important?  When you take the time to feel the “dough of life” and roll it out with patience and the vision of what it can turn out to be, the whole experience becomes less of a task and more of a treasured memory.

So, while I was putting the finishing touches on a batch of Christmas Stars to bring to the library, I realized that my girls were watching from a distance.  They understood that these, unlike cookies, were a special thing just for me and they didn’t want to interfere.  And I understood that they are storing the stars in their  Holiday Memory files.  I hope Grandma saw that, too.

Note to self:  make another batch of Stars.  Soon.  And invite my own little stars to dig their hands into the dough, too.