Christmas is here and 'tis the season for traditions. and family. and lots and lots of food. I love all of these things and so does the husband. And it's a good thing because between the two of us we have a lot of family, traditions and tons of opportunities to stuff ourselves beyond stretchy pant status.
Since this is our first married Christmas together, the husband and I thought it would be nice to start a few traditions and maybe reignite the fire on some old and forgotten traditions. The husband insisted that we make Christmas cookies and even recruited his sister and mother to join in on "the fun".
I feel I must tell you that I am not one to volunteer to be in the kitchen. Unless it involves cutting myself a nice slice of some chocolately dessert, I don't offer my services in the cooking department. The husband however, refuses to accept that I am not a domesticated cooking, cleaning, nurturing queen of her castle type. He is constantly coming home with new recipes that he wants to try out and perfecting the recipes we do have. And although I do not share his passion for cooking and just being in the kitchen in general, I try to enjoy the time I get to spend cooking with the husband.
So, needless to say, when I heard this idea of his that the husband undoubtedly deems as brilliant - I was skeptical. But, being the loving wife that I am, or at least try to be, I thought "how hard can it be?"
I imagined this scene: The husband and I are in the kitchen side by side mixing butter, flour, sugar. Cookie dough is made and we then move on to rolling the dough into perfectly uniform balls of sugary goodness. The dough is rolled and is put onto cookie sheets to be baked. And we’re done. Simple. Team Work. Hugs and Kisses.
Ha.
Little did I know the reality of the amount of work it actually takes to make Christmas cookies. The scenario I imagined is not at all how it actually played out.
First, we couldn’t just start making cookies, because we didn’t know how many cookies we needed to make. We had to make a list of our friends and family members that we wanted to give cookies to. Not only did we have to make a list of people, we had to decide how many of each kind of cookie each person would get. We also had to gather this information from the husband’s sister and mother who would also be handing out cookies.
Once we decided how many cookies we actually needed to make, we had to go get all the ingredients we need. Because Lord knows we don’t have pounds and pounds of sugar, flour, butter and all the other ingredients it actually takes to make cookies.
Ok, at this point I get a little worried. This is already a lot more work than I pictured. But I troop on, go with the flow and retain high hopes that the rest is the easy part.
Ha.
Making the cookie dough was actually fairly simple. We had all the ingredients, then mixed and put into gallon sized bags to store until it was time to actually bake the cookies.
Now comes the fun part. Making the cookies. It was during this stage of the process where I realized the husband likes to take on a certain role in the kitchen. He likes to state how things should be done and then sit back while I do them. Right. This was cause for much tension and bickering. This became particularly challenging when it came time to bake. Apparently one must bake all cookies at exactly 10 minutes. Why 10 minutes? Because the husband has it set in his mind that if the cookies bake even a second longer than 10 minutes they are inevitably ruined.
Baking all the cookies took about 4 hours in the kitchen. Two days in a row. And not only did we make cookies, but we made peppermint bark as well. This was the hardest one, because the white chocolate had to be heated up and poured over the milk chocolate very quickly and I always got in the way or didn’t do it fast enough.
This is how the peppermint is supposed to look. Ours were not so lucky. The milk chocolate and white chocolate ended up mixing and the result was marble peppermint bark.
At this point I was singing happy songs in my head. Yay we’re done!
Ha.
We then had to wrap all the cookies with cling wrap decorated with Christmasy pictures. And then we had to go over to the husband’s moms where we were going to combine all our cookies and package them to be handed out that weekend.
When we got to the husband’s moms house chaos hit. First of all, she wasn’t even home. Secondly, she only had about 2 dozen cookies baked. Thirdly, none of these were wrapped in cling wrap like we had agreed upon. What the hell. When she did get home the husband, sister, mom-in-law and myself all went to work baking and wrapping. This is when I realized where the husband gets his kitchen etiquette. The husband’s mom like to tell everyone else what to do, leave and go next door to grandma’s, come back and tell us how we did this wrong or need to do this too, leave and go to grandma’s…
Needless to say, we got to the mom-in-laws house at 4 and did not leave until 8:45pm. The husband and I had not eaten and I am not a happy person when I my stomach is empty and angry at me for not feeding it.
Cooking is a lot of work. too much work.
I don’t know that I will agree to baking cookies again next year.
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