Stan's World - Building Traditions
If you want to stay close to your family, or to your friends, start a tradition. You don’t necessarily have to announce it’s a tradition, but you will have to repeat it for it to become a tradition. My hunch is repeating the same event a few times will put it on everyone’s calendar, and voila, a tradition is born.
About 25 years ago, though we can’t recall the exact date, we baked holiday cookies with our daughters. They were in college, home on vacation, and everyone was available. The mix of cookies we baked isn’t significant. The fact that we baked together, however, is.
The next year, we did it again. And then again. When they met their future husbands, they joined us. As they had children, they participated as well. The years went by; the number of bakers grew, and the tradition endured.
We’ve reached the point where we collectively bake about 2,000 cookies, including 11 varieties. And while I don’t want to appear as a cookie snob peering down at the mere ho-ho-ho sugar cookie, I will point out our varieties are a tad more complex. We’re talking about three types of biscotti; butterscotch; Linzer tortes; pecan poppers; snowballs; cranberry with white chocolate chips; chocolate caramel bars; oatmeal walnut; and so forth. If your mouth is watering, you’re getting the point, because they’re darn good.
What we refer to as Cookie Weekend is an event. It starts with a typed, two-page list of ingredients (e.g., 16 pounds of flour, 13 pounds of butter). I get dispatched to the local ShopRite for multiple shopping expeditions.
Then there are the three large blue bins in the basement, holding cooling racks, cookie sheets, and dozens of cookie tins. They’ve got to be dragged upstairs and put into position.
We line up all the ingredients on the dining room table, set up folding tables in the garage where the cookies cool, and start the dough-making process on Thursday morning. By Saturday evening, all baking is complete. On Sunday morning, the cookies go into boxes, wrapped with ribbons, and are gifted to family, friends, and neighbors. The residual cookies remain in our garage as compensation for using our kitchen and sleeping in our beds. (For obvious reasons, I refuse to have blood work before March.)
Why keep doing it after all these years? We do it to bring as many of our family members home as possible. Not only do we want them close to us, but close to each other.
Other than baking cookies and eating a lot of take-out food (and cookies), another tradition on Cookie Weekend is me loading our grandchildren into a car to drive around and look at Christmas lights. Admittedly, this hasn’t always gone as smoothly as baking cookies.
There was, for example, the year we never got out of the driveway because of tears from a car seat arrangement that didn’t go as planned. Then there was the drive that was cut short because the driver (me) couldn’t tolerate the yelling and fighting from the backseats. But even those stories are part of Cookie Weekend's history.
My mom was a baker, so she used to attend some of the Cookie Weekend festivities. Inevitably, she would tell the bakers they were doing something wrong. It may have been how they rolled out the dough, assembled the rugelach (Google it), or set the oven to the incorrect temperature. Her baking critiques aside, I suspect my mom enjoyed each experience for its true value: family.
Yes, Cookie Weekend is a ton of work. By Sunday afternoon, once everyone has gone, we’re drained. But everyone knows we’ll all do it all over again next year.
I don’t know who ‘they’ are, but ‘they’ say that social interaction gets more important as we age. And if you’re aging like we are, think of a tradition that would be fun to do with your family or friends. And if you already engage in a holiday or other tradition, consider asking an elder to join you. Sure, you may be told you don’t know how to properly assemble the rugelach, but you’ll remember the story for years to come.
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