Dear Nick

Dear Nick,

Every year I say to myself, “This year will be the year that I write early to Nick!  We will develop an extended correspondence that is worthy of being memorialized in storybooks everywhere.  Our epistolary repartee will be, in turns, charming, witty, heartfelt, and occasionally nostalgic.”  And every year, without fail, you get a hastily scribbled note that reads, “Hope you like the cookies.  Say hi to Rudy.”

Well, at least this year I’m writing a day earlier than usual.  By the time you read this, I will have just finished making all the goodies for you, and perhaps I will have even helped Brenda with her selection of baked delights, too.  Unfortunately, the reason why I’m writing earlier is to caution you to temper your anticipation.  You see, I’d forgotten how nostalgia and memory — or should I say, misrememory (er, as in “misremember”*) — influence the retrospective appreciation of flavours.  To be frank, the goods aren’t as good as I remember them to have been in years past.

I know, I know, I’m a perfectionist; still, they don’t taste quite as good as I remember, nor were they as easy to make as I had thought.  My suspicion is that the air has changed these days, which is why all the recipes are turning out too dry, as if I’d mistakenly added half again as much flour as needed.  Granted, it’s actually snowing this lovely dry snow this year, where usually we get a slushy muck that flumps from the sky.  This year’s snow is dry and powdery, like the champagne powder I always want to ski on but rarely ever do, at least in the local mountains.  In fact, the snow is rather like the shortbread dough I made yesterday.  I followed the recipe exactly, but instead of having a nice, coherent dough, I ended up with buttered, sugary flour.  The dough would clump in large, snowball-sized balls, but not in cookie-size balls.  Like packing the perfect snowball, I would have to gently coax the dough into a sphere and set it down gently on the baking sheet.  Eventually, I just gave up and squished it all into a rimmed baking sheet, and then half-heartedly attempted to cut squares out of it when it finished baking.  Maybe I should just market it as a new recipe: “Holiday Snow!  You can eat it with a spoon!  Or throw it at your brother!”  (I didn’t mean that!  Do keep me on the nice list.  After all, it’s super-yummy “snow” that I’d be chucking at him.)

The gingerbread, too, reeks of underachievement.  Like the shortbread, the gingerbread dough was dry and crumbly.  It was also a lot more time-consuming than I anticipated.  It took somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3 hours to mix the dough, roll it out, and bake the shapes, then another couple of hours to make the icing and decorate the cookies.  Icing gingerbread cookies solo has got to be the loneliest thing in the world.  Do you remember, when I was little, that I used to always decorate the cookies with my auntie?  That was so much fun!  Even in the last half-decade I’ve had two or three cookie-decorating parties, which were hilariously amusing as well.  This year, I was busy working on that time-consuming academic project, so I didn’t feel up to the task of hosting another party.  Perhaps I should have, because then I would have enjoyed the task more.  Also, I would have remembered to buy the gumdrops and jelly beans and Smarties and candy canes.  The gingerbread will be rather bare this year, I’m afraid.

I hope to have more success with the thumbprint cookies that I’m making today, as soon as my house warms up enough to make the butter and cream cheese soft enough to mix.  It was both easy and yummy the last time I made it, so hopefully it will turn out well.  I’ll be using this awesome jam from France for the cookies, which I’m sure will contribute to the deliciousness of the final product.  If all else fails, I’ll leave the jam with scones or something, ’cause it’s really yummy jam. 

Anyways, I’m going to get started on those cookies now.  If all else fails, I’ll save you some of the triple-chocolate cookies I made last week and decorated in an appropriately festive way.  (See enclosed snapshot.)  Hope you have a great year and hey, write back soon, eh?

 

*Yes, this is a highly pretentious habit I’ve retained from my academic career, that of inventing words that pretend to capture the essence of something uncannily resistant to verbalization, but just result in obfuscation.

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