Oh the weather outside is delightful…
It’s 72° today in beautiful, sunny Pennsylvania. 72°. On the 13th of December. About 30 degrees higher than normal.
I think we’ll grill, tonight.
It’s funny… I never really associated Christmas and cold during the first 20 years of my life, but I’ve lived in the snow for a large portion of the ensuing 43… The Tahoe years were some of the most fun – and irresponsible, I might add. Illegally cutting down trees to fit in the living room with the 20′ ceiling was always fun. Recreational drugs and copious amounts of alcohol were usually involved. Really… Have you ever seen what a 20-foot Christmas Tree can do to a room? It fills it up, that’s for damned sure. Not to mention the ropes needed to keep it from falling over. It’s not like we actually cut a flat base or had a proper stand. We tried stringing popcorn one year, but you can’t string too much popcorn when you’re stoned and eating it faster than you can get in on the thread…
Ah… sweet youth…
As I moved back and forth across the USofA and pretended to mature, more times than not I ended up in another snow-place… Quite a few Christmas’ in Boston. That was always fun. Boston had been a city for some 350 years when I moved there – and every time it snowed, they acted like it was the first time they had ever seen the white stuff fall from the sky. Truly incredible. Buffalo, on the other hand, just kept moving. It could be blizzarding outside and folks just went about their business like it was a balmy spring day.
I began to equate Winter with Cold, and Cold with Cookies. Not a bad association in the grand scheme of things…
While I always baked Christmas Cookies, the real cookie-baking didn’t take off until Victor moved west in 1994. Then it got serious. At our peak, we were baking thousands of cookies. Really. Multiple thousands. We baked, wrapped, packaged, and shipped cookies. We were nuts. Totally insane.
We’ll probably barely break a thousand this year. We’ve cut way back. We’re still nuts, but it’s much more manageable, now…
There’s definitely a benefit to having the windows open no matter what the time of year, so while I would prefer the weather to be seasonal, I’m going to enjoy every shorts-wearing day we get.
And keep making cookie dough.
Mele Kalikimaka.