The Cookie Monster

After making all those lovely cookies, the husband and I were excited to pass them out. Naturally. I wanted to brag about how many hours we spent in the kitchen making and packaging those stupid cookies share the wonnderful goodness that was our Christmas goodie package. Our friends and families raved about how lovely, chewy and delicious our goodies were. It made my heart all warm and fuzzy.

Until.

Our neighbors. I am going to seriously reconsider handing out our blood, sweat and tears to the neighbors next year. They are the reason I had to resort to turning into the cookie monster. (The old cookie monster, when he actually ate cookies and didn't try to convince little children to eat their vegetables.) It wasn't my fault. I had no choice. They made me do it.

It's like when you're on your period and somebody says something stupid. The hormones take over and you flip out, yelling frantically that they are an idiot. Them being an ignorant fool justifies your yelling and overreacting. It was like that.

The husband and I thought we were being neighborly when we walked next door to our neighbor to the right. They are a nice couple with two little kids, one of which has wandered into our garage on a number of occassions to ask all sorts of 3 year old questions:

Boy Neighbor: "Hi!"
Me: "Hi David. How are you today?"
Boy Neighbor: "Good. What are you doing?"
Me: "Unloading groceries."
Boy Neighbor: "Why?"
Me: "Because they have to go in the fridge or they will go bad."
Boy Neighbor: "Why?"

And then start the questions. He asks why about everything. Why is the husband playing on the computer. Why am I planting plants in the patio. Why don't we have any pets. They never stop. But I put up with it because he's just so darn cute.

Nonetheless, they are very nice and I am pretty sure their kid likes us. So we walk next door on Christmas Eve. The neighbor husband answers the door and with it comes noise from talking, tv and yummy smells wafting from the kitchen. (The husband wanted no part in this, so he is standing by the patio gate while I was the one to knock at the door and do all the talking.) I tell him that we baked some cookies and just wanted to say happy holidays.

The look on his face was one of surprise. I could see him thinking "Oh no, I didn't get them anything. Why did they bake us cookies? What can I give them in return?" As he is looking around he says, "Why don't you come in?"

I can see the numerous family members packed into his living room and more as you look toward the kitchen. I know he's only asking because we brought him a present and he doesn't have one for us.

I start to say "Oh no, that's ok we really have to..."

But before I can say it, the husband is suddenly at my side, nudging me inside the door while saying "OK." I wanted to kill him.

As we stood in the entry way of their home, their relatives came up one by one to introduce themselves. There were a lot of them. It was like they were multiplying before our eyes. After saying hello we stood in awkward silence for what felt like a year until the neighbor told us we should come back tomorrow for some homemade Christmas food that his mom was cooking and let us go back home.

It was the most awkward 3 minutes of my life.

Because of our wonderful experience with the neighbors to the right, I was leery to go to the neighbors to the left. I didn't want to be invited into their home to have another one of those moments. A moment where we are both smiling a fake smile because we are thinking about what we can possibly say. After all, we hardly know each other. We've met a handful of times. And it doesn't help that this neighbor in particular always seems to look angry. So we both just stand there, waiting for someone to say that they have something to go do so we can both go back to the safety of our own home.

We knocked, but nobody answered. It was a relief and yet not because we knew that meant we had to go back and try again.

I went next door probably 3 more times with no luck. Then one night all their lights were on. This was a good sign. I could finally get rid of these cookies and feel better about myself for being a good neighbor. The husband had refused to go with me since the first time so I walked next door on my own.

I knocked. No answer. I knocked again a little louder thinking maybe they didn't hear me. Still no answer. My mind goes through possible scenarios: Maybe the wife isn't home and the husband is in the shower. Or they are in the garage working on their car so they can't hear my kock. Still possible, they are superheros off saving the world from a giant sea monster that looks like a spider. (I hate spiders.) Since they are doing me the world such a favor, I will forgive them for not answering the door.

I start walking back to my house, get to the gate and then the porch light turns on. Oh, I guess they aren't saving the world afterall. I assume they are looking at me through the peep hole. They should recognize that I am their neighbor holding a bag full of cookies for them. As I wait for them to open the door, I slowly realize that they aren't going to. They are mocking me through the peep hole, I can feel their eyes burning into my flesh.

I'm pissed. How dare they refuse to open the door to their neighbor! I can't believe they are that malicious.

I had made up my mind to show them! As soon as I was inside the door I started devouring their cookies.

Possibly the worst part about it, is now I see them all. the. time. I see them walking to the mail box, leaving the same time I am, at the grocery store. I mean really. Are they stalking me? Because the cookies are long gone by now.

At the same time I get a little chuckle that I enjoyed my yummy goodness that was our Christmas care package.

Cooking is not for sissies.

The holidays have come and gone for the year of 2009. And yet, it has taken me this long to write about my cookie catastrophe. I think it has to do with the fact that I wanted to forget all about cookies and baking for a while. So, as an ode to Christmas 2009, I give you my two cents on why I do not enjoy cooking:

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.