Who I Am: Traditions

Why do so many traditions revolve around food? Or is that just me? Birthday cake, birthday chocolate chip pancakes, cherry cheese pie at Thanksgiving, rum cake at Christmas. You can see why I love need to run. My traditions will shoot me up three sizes if I’m not careful.

Of all my foodie traditions, I cling to roll-out sugar cookies the tightest. Sure they’re yummy, but they also remind me of my Oma. As a child, I only had one living grandparent, my mother’s mother. I called her Oma since my father is Dutch and that’s the Dutch word for grandma.

I didn’t get to see Oma much while I was growing up. She lived in Wisconsin while we, because of my Dad’s career with the US Army, hit several locations in the US and finally settled in Virginia. However, she came to visit every Christmas, and her presence, along with her off key singing of “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” signaled the holiday.

By the time I was in junior high (aka “middle school”) a neurological disease had confined my mother to a wheelchair. I learned to cook at a young age, and Oma tutored me in a challenging, but indispensable skill: rolling out sugar cookies.

She taught me several important aspects of a successful sugar cookie, including:

• the right recipe (We liked the one from Mrs. Beatty, my kindergarten teacher. I believe Oma tracked her down in a grocery store to get it.)
• the chill factor  (the dough needs at least an hour in the fridge)
• proper rolling technique (don’t push to hard, roll in several directions, flour the rolling pin, keep the dough about a quarter inch thick)
• keep cookies of similar size on each baking sheet (don’t mix big Christmas trees with tiny bells- no one wants to smell burning bells)

Every year I looked forward to picking out cookie cutters and baking with her. Decorating them evolved into an art form similar to painting. Oma + cookies = Christmas.

Oma died before my first child was born, but I kept up the tradition with my kids; we’ve rolled dough from early ages.  I’m not going to pretend I’ve never snapped over spilled flour or dough dropped on the floor, but overall, we’ve had a good time. I finally figured out that it worked best to operate in shifts, one child at a time. Each child gets a ball of dough to roll out and cut, and he or she uses the remnants that can’t be rolled to form the first letter of his or her name. The oldest two are losing interest in cutting, although eating is still a passion. (This year we’ll have to find a vegan recipe for daughter.)

After all the cookies are baked, we sit down with frosting of multiple colors to decorate. Even my dad, who the kids call “Opa” (you guessed it, the Dutch word for Grandpa) pitches in … on the adorning and the eating. I still need to remind everyone not to lick their fingers while handling the cookies!

Do traditions in your family revolve around food as well? Tell us about one!

One more pic, because it’s just so adorable:

Thanks for stopping by!

If you’d like to participate in the Who I Am project, visit Dana’s blog for details.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us

Save