Cookie Day

 [Today's post brought to you by 18-year-old me. The following is an Essay of Observation, written when I was a senior in high school. It is just as accurate today as it was seven years ago. Photos are from today, not 2004.]

Checkerboards, not featured in the post.

The countertops are glistening as I come into the kitchen.  Today is cookie-baking day and Mom has wiped every surface clean.  Christmas music drifts in from the family room.

Shanna rummages through muffin tins and plastic silverware in the bottom cupboard, her hands finally emerging with the shiny black cookie sheets and stainless steel cooling racks.  I reach to the top shelf of another cupboard, fumbling for the plastic canisters of flour and sugar.  Mom rustles through her old, red Betty Crocker cookbook to find the stained and tattered booklet that contains all of our precious recipes.  Our favorites are marked in yellow highlighter and the kinds to prepare first have been carefully numbered in pencil. 

Before long the air is hazy with flour and our fingers are sticky.  The mixer drones on as I snap the switch to low speed and pour in a teaspoon of vanilla.  Shanna uses a warm dishcloth to wipe a thin film of flour off the plastic-coated recipe card and reads off the next few ingredients.  Mom is recounting the sticks of butter softening on the counter.  Butter is a staple in all of our calorie-laden cookie recipes.

The oven timer barks anxiously and there is a mad rush to save the batch from any trace of singeing.  Presently the cookies are sampled.  They might be my favorite sugar-coated “pecan snowballs,” their delicate nuttiness melting on my tongue.  Or maybe buttery spritz cookies crumbling at the first bite.  

Tiers of Spritz

At last the final cup of flour has been measured and the final cookie has been decorated.  The oven has been switched off and the last batch of cookies has been counted and set out to cool.  We collect the Christmas cookie tins and rinse out last year’s crumbs.  Then, layering them between ragged sheets of waxed paper, we gently nestle the cookies in the tins.  With a final sheet of waxed paper on the top layer of each tin, we snap on the lids and pack them away for a brief hibernation in the basement freezer.