Cookie Traditions

Although we've been together for seven years, the only holiday tradition the Sous Chef and I have established is to buy an ornament every year to commemorate something about our relationship from that year - the year we got married, for example, we purchased the Old World wedding cake ornament.

Other than that, though, we tend to default to the traditions that our respective families have created.  On my side, we have the Turkey Dance.  On the Sous Chef's side, we have - Nanny's cookies.

Nanny was the Sous Chef's beloved grandmother on his mother's side.  Every year, she would get out her classic sugar cookie recipe, whip up a huge batch of dough, and set to work.  When I entered the family, I figured, Hey, it's baking cookies.  I can handle this.  But I had no idea how seriously they take Cooking Baking Day.  Sous Chef tried to prepare me, and I thought I was mentally ready - we literally tried on "apron outfits" the night before to perfect our Serious Cooking Baking Look:

Sous Chef is ready; I, though very cute in my holiday apron, have no idea what I'm getting myself into.

Outfit aside, I so wasn't ready.  First of all, there's the recipe - basically butter with some sugar and flour thrown in to hold it together.  Sous Chef's mother was meticulous about reading the ingredients to us over the phone.  That should have been my first clue.

Second, there's the size of the dough discs.  When you prepare the dough, you're supposed to separate it into several flattened discs, which makes it easier to roll out when you're ready to cut out cookies.  When we arrived with our two dough discs, the Sous Chef's mother scoffed and said, "Those are huge!  I guess we'll see how they turn out..."  Geez.

When the time finally came to start rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies, that's when the real stress started (for me, anyway).  You see, though I love cooking and baking, I am not exactly what you'd call a team player.  Except for the Sous Chef, I get along with pretty much no one in the kitchen.  You'd think that the knowledge that I was going to be baking cookies as part of a family tradition would have been enough to make me realize I'd have to share, but apparently I chose not to hear that part.  So when I began rolling out a dough disc, and I was suddenly scolded for rolling it too thin, and then there were four or five sets of little hands trying to cut cookies all at the same time, I got a bit - overwhelmed.

I will admit, I turned into a cranky-puss (I kindly edited out the photos of me bent over the cookies, trying to ignore the chaos around me while furrowing my brow judgmentally).  The Sous Chef actually had to pull me aside and tell me to "chill out".  Apparently next year, I need to take a hit of Xanax with my eggnog to better prepare myself for this marathon event...

I somehow managed to put aside my perfectionistic ways (some well-timed departures to go check my email in the other room helped out a lot) and enjoy the day.  And I'm glad I did, because in the end, though the tight quarters, obsessively-clinging-to-tradition behaviors, and sugar crashes can make us all a bit edgy, isn't that what the holidays are all about?

My jigsaw puzzle addiction finally comes in handy...

Apparently you're not doing it right unless you get flour into crevices you didn't know you had...

Don't get me started on the do's and don'ts of Sprinkle Application...

The Sous Chef, always the clever artist, came up with this gingerbread-men-as-snowflake creation 

Happy (even if they're a wee bit stressful) Holidays, everyone!