Another One Bites the Dust

Another tradition, I mean.

There was a time when Christmas here meant a house packed full of family and we baked and decorated like crazy. And enjoyed it. Then as the family continued to grow, and the next generation got married, we dispersed into other groupings.

I got tired of the decorating. Not so much putting it out, but packing it all away was overwhelming. Somehow I was always alone when the time came. So we chose the things that meant the most to us and stuck to those.

I baked less and less--there just weren't enough people around to eat all the excess. I finally asked my family which desserts they needed to make Christmas Christmas, and ended up with two kinds of cookies and one bread. Very do-able.

One of those cookies was the almond Christmas trees made with the cookie press. This was the tradition I brought from my family. My original press worked beautifully once I got the rhythm going. There was a handle that turned the screw that pushed the dough out of the tube. It worked for decades and then suddenly it didn't.

I had to replace it with the "shooter" version, which looked like it would be easier, but it wasn't. Even when it worked properly, the tube emptied so quickly that I felt like I was spending more time filling it than making cookies.

But I kept on struggling with the miserable contraption, right up through last year. Last year I took a stand and decided that I wasn't going to do it again. Ever. I thought I'd notify my daughters of this new state of affairs with a poem in this blog.

Turns out I'm not that clever. So I called each of them and said that if one of them wanted to pick up the slack it would be nice, but if not, I'd be happy to mix up the dough and make little lump cookies. We'd have the flavor without the shape. Or the agony.

This isn't a good test year, obviously. But I'm willing to wait and see whether anyone picks this tradition up and dusts it off.