Every year, immediately post-Christmas right when I'm getting ready to head out from my mom's place she proceeds to load me up with every shape, size, flavor, and breed of Christmas cookie that have ever been created. When I was very young, she used to go *all* out with Christmas. The house was decorated to the nines, there were advent calendars galore, trips to see Santa (whenever we could get to the mall), and about eleventy billion cookies/bars/candies floating around the house to ensure that my brother and I were sufficiently overstimulated that we'd suffer a blood-sugar crash around 8:30 and need to be carried into bed. In later years, I realized that this was because they needed time to wrap presents and set up the Christmas stockings so that when we woke up Christmas morning (typically the only way we would actually wake up before they did) it would all be ready to go and we wouldn't have to wait to immediately start playing with (read: breaking) our new christmas booty.
As I got older of course, most of the pre-christmas craziness tapered off, but the cookie collection grew and grew. As I got older I realized that part of it has to do with mom's family being huge, and necessitating not only lots of food for all the cousins (hence the 4-5 bins of tupperware full of cookies we'd usually bring down) but also the need to bring more than her sisters did. While the competition was fierce, it was subtle and friendly and none of us kids minded because we were acting just like the kids from Willy Wonka when they first enter the Fudge Room. Only without the rudeness.
The great thing about this is that every year I brought tons of Christmas cookies back to college after every winter break, making me very popular and helping keep food expenses down. You'd be surprised how much vitamins and minerals you can get from cookies if you eat enough volume. 1% of your US RDA of B12 in one cookie *sounds* unhealthy, but when you eat a couple dozen every day, suddenly who needs breakfast?
But the bad thing is that once I finished school the cookies typically ended up going into *my* stomach and nobody else's. So this year I finally took the step of just throwing the excess cookies away after my first week back. If I don't start watching what I eat now I'm sooo not going to be ready for swimsuit season. Still, those cookies were really good and I'm going to miss them. Damn, sometimes being a grownup really isn't as fun as I thought it would be when I was 10.
* To be completely honest, my tree is still up, and will probably stay up until at least my birthday...maybe arbor day...heck, it's small enough I could probably just leave it up all year and nobody would notice.
As I got older of course, most of the pre-christmas craziness tapered off, but the cookie collection grew and grew. As I got older I realized that part of it has to do with mom's family being huge, and necessitating not only lots of food for all the cousins (hence the 4-5 bins of tupperware full of cookies we'd usually bring down) but also the need to bring more than her sisters did. While the competition was fierce, it was subtle and friendly and none of us kids minded because we were acting just like the kids from Willy Wonka when they first enter the Fudge Room. Only without the rudeness.
The great thing about this is that every year I brought tons of Christmas cookies back to college after every winter break, making me very popular and helping keep food expenses down. You'd be surprised how much vitamins and minerals you can get from cookies if you eat enough volume. 1% of your US RDA of B12 in one cookie *sounds* unhealthy, but when you eat a couple dozen every day, suddenly who needs breakfast?
But the bad thing is that once I finished school the cookies typically ended up going into *my* stomach and nobody else's. So this year I finally took the step of just throwing the excess cookies away after my first week back. If I don't start watching what I eat now I'm sooo not going to be ready for swimsuit season. Still, those cookies were really good and I'm going to miss them. Damn, sometimes being a grownup really isn't as fun as I thought it would be when I was 10.
* To be completely honest, my tree is still up, and will probably stay up until at least my birthday...maybe arbor day...heck, it's small enough I could probably just leave it up all year and nobody would notice.
Comments
Just leave your tree up, one less thing to do now...one less thing to do after Thanksgiving.