Yesterday I found my way to the big-ish grocery store to stock up on a few things for our annual cookie delivery. I’m not sure there’s a prettier thing out there than a freshly baked tin of Christmas cookies. It’s not too difficult to take any childhood favorite recipe and rework it using your everyday crunchy-girl ingredients, if you’d like to do so. Next year we hope to make maple sugar in addition to syrup, and reserve a bunch for holiday baking. If we get a good run on early season sap, it is more neutral in flavor and will make an excellent baking sugar for the more delicate treats. Sucanat is also great for certain recipes, but not so much in a standard rolled sugar cookie. I like it, but I’m not sure about Adam’s office staff or my neighbors. This post isn’t really about swapping ingredients though, nor am I suggesting that you should, but whenever I mention holiday baking there are questions so I’m just trying to give some info. With a little creativity you can think of all sorts of substitutions. Don’t get me wrong, these tins are unapologetically filled with sugar, but you know… it’s free range, hand crafted, harvested by the light of a full moon, organic sugar. So basically, as nutritious as kale. (Oh! One more thing, India Tree is a good place to find cookie decorating items.)
Anyway, back to the grocery store. I make my way through the necessary aisles and by the time I hit the register, have reached my limit of laundry soap off-gassing and government approved “safe” food choices. Rather than freak out in the middle of aisle twelve as I contemplate this being all that most people can afford, I realize it’s time to get out of here. The checkout lady is in her late seventies, by my guess, with beautifully manicured hands and carefully applied make-up. Her hair is so pretty, too. I’m terrible at styling hair. She seems tired and leans the weight of her small body into the counter. As she slowly scans my items, I wonder if she wants or needs this work. I hope she wants it. We discuss baking for a minute and when my pile of butter makes its way down the belt, she alerts me that Land O’ Lakes is on sale: Buy 1 Get 1 Free. I politely let her know that I saw the sign, but it’s okay, I really like this kind. She looked unsure of me for a quick moment, and resumed scanning without further comment. I immediately felt terrible, like some kind of elitist-butter-snob-jerk in the face of her sale-directing kindness. She wasn’t offended of course, as I wasn’t actually being a jerk, I just felt ashamed, given my seemingly reckless ten pound grass-fed butter purchase in contrast to her frugal sensibility. Silently though, my mind started playing its defensive monologue, explaining the myriad of ways in which we do not spend money so that we can budget for the damn butter. Thankfully though, on this day, my mouth knew well enough to stay shut. We carried on in peace, she with her admirable beauty and me with my lip balm regimen, she with her Buy 1 Get 1 Free butter and me with my pile of fancy stuff.
Finally, she finishes scanning my items and tells me the total. Then she looks at me with the brightest smile, reaches for a piece of paper on the counter behind her, and waves it in front of the computer, registering me for a senior citizen discount that took $20 off my bill. At first I imagined she thought I was a senior citizen (maybe I should put in more effort than lip balm?), but then she winked and said, “You’re doing all this shopping for your mother, right?” Some moments in life come with a bit of magic, you know? I wish you could have seen the pleased look on her face, which can only be described as mischievous generosity. She was tickled by her exercise of power, and I was happy to see she still felt so feisty at her age.
Today I’ll make the cookies, arranging each tin just so, and tomorrow is delivery day. I need to make one additional stop on my route this year; I hope she notices how delicious the fancy butter is.