Let me start off with my hyggelig moment (my Danish speaking friend tells me that Hyggelig is the adjective form of hygge).
It's nearly dusk and I am lost in reflection on the last 24 hours. It's been intense.
Last night, as some of you who read Ocean on the early side may have noticed, image loading was disabled on my blog. After all these years of blogging and many many episodes of software or computer malfunction, I've learned the protocol: when something is not working, you erase cookies, reboot your computer, try a different browser, try a different computer, google the issue on the internet to see if anyone else is experiencing the same problem, and finally, only then, call -- Ed!
The trouble is that Ed and I were in the thick of a rather difficult moment (the holidays seem to bring this out: penetrating discussions about the fundamentals of our daily life together). We put it aside to try to resolve the blog photos issue. We tried everything, he tried everything, finally, well after midnight, we gave up. Only to return to our penetrating discussion about the fundamentals of our daily life together -- a conversation that basically took up much of the night. It's not something he enjoys, but I view it as essential. You need to put labels on things, and explain them to each other, and come together (or not) on some happy path forward.
We finally fell asleep at around 6 a.m. and of course, I was up soon after because I had a date with the grandkids to bake cookies.
I rushed to get things ready. I mean, I was a speed demon!
I thought I would be tired, but somehow all that expression of inner most thoughts seems to have been good for me because that and the presence of these wonderful two kids absolutely lifted me to places where tiredness does not exist!
Here's our cookie baking morning and early afternoon:
(arrival)
(ready to roll)
I remembered several things about cookie baking: the "natural" sugars and coloring agents are tame in color. Unless you pour it on, you'll get pastels rather than eye popping color. Which, to me, is a very good thing! A gentle blue on the snowflake. A quiet green (or pink!) on the tree. Soft, not brash.
(tasting chocolate sprinkles)
And cooking times can be way off if you roll out a thicker cookie dough than the 1/8 inch you're instructed to produce. (When you bake with a three year old, you need a cookie that is slightly less fragile than the 1/8 incher.) What was to be a baking time of 12-15 minutes produced a cookie that clearly looked like it hadn't been in the sun long enough. Another 10 minutes still did not produce the golden glow at the edges. So you need time and patience.
Sprinkles go on prior to the bake, frosting goes on after. More sprinkles can be added to a frosted cookie of course. (Sparrow is working through color combinations...)
The kids were so excited and happy that there was plenty of patience to go around. Time? Not so much. Snowdrop had a violin lesson later in the afternoon and we needed to be done by then. (Who knew that cookie baking and decorating would take more than three hours??)
Finally, if you are going to put your own frosting into little jars for squeeze-decorating, well then someone has to stand there and force feed that frosting into the little opening of the little jar. And squeezing it back out is going to require strong little hands!
(Thanks, Ed for helping with this part!)
In the end, we produced several dozen of credible Christmas cookies! The kids were soooo proud!
(first batch)
(Ed took this one...)
(...and this one)
And after I dropped one child off here and the other one off there, I came home and I put up the final tree decoration -- the star, made of grape vines, and sat down to exhale and reflect. And the tree looked so beautiful and my day felt so full and rich.
