I’ve Put Christmas Back in the Boxes, But My Mind Is Still Remembering

It is January, which hasn’t yet seemed like winter. It’s been chilly today, and the temperatures have been in the 40’s and 50’s. There’s supposed to be a freeze tonight, and tomorrow night the temperature might be as low as 25.° Then, it’s highs in the 60’s again. There might be some winter in, maybe, February. For now, I’m still remembering Christmas.

Peter came for a few days, during the first days of his Christmas break.

I had very carefully asked everyone what would be the food they would need to be prepared for the best holiday experience while they visited. And these were the notes I made:

Jeremy-pimento cheese, Fritos, and White Chocolate covered Oreos. And, they’d had some great hot chocolate Bombs when he and Sarah celebrated Christmas, back in Brooklyn, and he thought that would be nice, too.

April’s choice for what she’d most like was chocolate cookies with cherries in them.

Kevin wanted the frozen cranberry salad that my mother used to make.

I was a little challenged by the cookies, but when I looked in the notebook where I keep all the recipes of things I’ve cooked/baked/prepared over the years, I easily found those cookies. And, I was pretty sure (and I was right) that Mother’s cranberry salad would also be there, also under the tab “Holidays.” The more challenging item was the White Chocolate covered Oreos. If there were any of those anywhere in Waco, they’d been sold out. And I searched at Target, Wal-Mart, H.E.B., Drug Emporium, and any other store that I thought might have them. No luck.So . . . when Peter came to visit, we baked those cookies that April wanted, and we made that frozen salad that Kevin wanted, and Peter and I opened up a package of mini Oreos, melted down a couple of packages of white chocolate discs, and we dunked those little Oreos in the melted white chocolate and made the cookies that Jeremy wanted.

We put all our holiday treats in the freezer to keep safe until the relatives came.

Peter also created a snack mix that he thought we (me) should make. I didn’t have the ingredients (except for the French’s onions), so I was going to have to shop later for the rest of the ingredients.

Feel free to make this delicious mix yourself. Or make your own yummy snack mix. The ingredients are easy to find. And, I made twice the amount and still have more cashews and golden raisins.

At Thanksgiving, we had crackers that had the regular snap when pulled open and they included the usual tissue paper hat and fortune and toy.

I’d gotten some Christmas crackers, too, which we really enjoyed. When you pulled them open, they had kazoos. And, there was a long list, in each cracker, of suggested songs. So, someone would “play” a song on the kazoo, and the rest of us had to determine what, exactly, that song was. It’s harder (and much more amusing) than you might imagine.

I bought, on Amazon, I think, a package of, basically, chunks of chocolate on sticks: two chocolate, two white chocolate, and two dark chocolate. The instructions said to heat up milk in a mug and then dip and stir the chocolate until it was completely melted. It was delicious. We drank the hot, chocolatey milk while we watched Claymation Christmas which we watch every year. We love traditions.

When I was doing some of the cleanup after Peter and I had cooked, Peter was working on this math problem. I didn’t know what he was working on so hard, but, suddenly, out of the blue, he said, “Mimi, do you know what 24 minus 16 is?”

I thought a couple of seconds, and said,” Eight.”

And he was quite taken aback.

“That’s right,” he said.

I guess he’s working on “borrowing” in math class at school. And, I can see his careful work. He had to take a “ten” from the twenty to make the “fourteen” that he’d use to subtract the six, giving him the eight. And then, in the ten’s column, the remaining “ten” would give him a zero in that column.

So now he knows that, not only can I cook, I can also subtract.

After all the baking, after all the traveling, after all the fun and joy and love, we stop to remember that this is all we need to know.