In December of 1979 my sister Laura gave me a cookbook. We had been sharing an apartment in Anchorage Alaska while she worked for a veterinary office and I drifted from pillar to post in the world of waitressing. After six months she was preparing to go back to Powhatan, and I was moving into an “efficiency” apartment in the basement of a house across an alley from a loud bar. That Christmas would be my first away from my family, and I celebrated it with a fellow waitress: we went to said loud bar on Christmas Eve and danced with Santa, who was distributing tiny bottles of tequila. We then spent the night at my friend’s sister’s house. The next morning, hung over as I was, I waited with an empty, unhappy stomach until Christmas dinner was finally ready around two o’clock. These days, upon waking up, I would have immediately asked for a piece of toast.

But I digress. Laura gave me Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook, complete with an inscription that I treasure to this day. The book sits in a place of honor in my kitchen; it gets to lie on its side since its back cover has been replaced and taped over so many times. When I pick it up, it usually falls open to the section on Christmas sugar cookies. This recipe, which has never been improved upon in the interim forty years, calls for butter, sugar and flour with assorted spices and some milk, and makes perfect cookies for cutting into shapes.

For the longest time, I never had any luck with putting frosting on these cookies, because I was convinced that such frosting was made from confectioner’s sugar and milk, period, end of sentence. When I finally looked up a recipe, I realized that butter was an integral part of it, and since then I have had much better luck with making suitably spreadable frosting. When I get around to it, that is.

Recently, I made some Christmas cookies, and since even now I tend to get bored before I get to the part about making the frosting, I thought of a brilliant shortcut. I would just add food coloring to the cookie dough! But since these were Christmas cookies, I wanted the holly leaves to be green and the candy canes to be red. So I made the dough, broke it into four chunks, and added a different color to each. Through this experience, I learned that it is difficult to add food coloring to fully completed cookie dough, because it doesn’t want to blend. I got more on my hands than I did in the dough, and the best I could achieve was a kind of marbled effect. The holly leaves, the stars and the (blue) bells didn’t look too bad, but the candy canes looked like steak. 

But I am not defeated. My next foray into the world of cookie making will be to make some Valentine’s Day hearts. I will add the red food coloring to the liquid stage of the dough-making process, and thus I will (I expect) wind up with uniformly pink dough. Then I will bake the beautiful hearts, and, if I get really carried away, I will add some trim with white icing, butter and all. The only big concern is to make sure I have some outlets for unloading (I mean sharing) these cookies, so that I don’t wind up eating every jack one of them myself.