Day 7: You Will Eat Way Too Much Food...In Bed

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Intro: The 12 Days Of Christmas Memories
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Closing
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As the Grinch learned, Christmas doesn't come from a store. And it's a warm feeling to give a gift that someone will enjoy, when that gift can't be found in any store. In this sense, some of the best presents I've been able to give have been Mom's cookies.

Each winter when I was growing up, Mom made about three freezers of cookies. I've since learned that a "freezer" is not an internationally-accepted unit of volume, but let's just say that Mom would make several dozen...of each of perhaps 10 different types of cookies. Molasses, peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin. Those chocolate cookies that are spooned out in balls but flatten as they bake, producing a cracked powdered sugar finish. The sugar/butter cookies in multiple cookie-cutter shapes. Peppermint cookies that actually have two pink- and white-colored strips wound around each other like a candy cane. My all-time favorite, almond ball cookies. And fudge...I'm talking about real, you-may-want-to-sit-down fudge.

Mom would put a few of a particular cookie into a baggie, then pack several baggies of different cookies into a Christmas-themed paper bag or foil tray. Decorative ribbon? You bet. Each teacher, for any of us kids, got a package, and if you were a principal, receptionist, coach, or teacher's aide, you usually scored a mini-tray of your own. As I got older, I started making the recipients list myself, and it grew each year. My senior year of high school, in addition to my teachers, I gave cookies to the school nurses, the counselors' assistants, the librarians, and the captains of the soccer team. Even when I got my first real job, in Fort Wayne, I went home a week or two before Christmas so I could bring back cookies for my bosses.

Every thank-you note read exactly the same way: "Thanks to you and your mom for the delicious cookies! I ate every last one of them the very first night."

The only reason I personally focused on quantity is because I already knew they were sinfully awesome. The question was how many Mom would let me have. Per day.

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Tonight we're going to Little Szechwan!

Almost every year, usually just a few days before Christmas, our family has dinner at Little Szechwan. We get several dishes, which we all share, and which we choose based on a combination of (1) our imperfect memories of what we liked before, (2) a desire for variety and balance, and (3) whatever sounds really good. Perennial favorites include beef with orange peel and kung bao shrimp, and we usually decide on everything else and then order a mu shu appetizer with whichever meat we didn't cover in our other dishes. The appetizers usually also include potstickers and, recently, those mini barbecue ribs. Maybe two orders of the ribs. The best name for a dish, in my mind, was Men Chu Beef -- Ben once picked this out from the specials menu, but I can't recall what it tasted like. Teddy still mocks me for once ordering a fish item. Wasn't that with the ginger sauce? That was pretty good!

While they've never served us a duck that was still smiling, Little Szechwan was where I first discovered green tea, warm towels, and fru-fru drinks (back in the day, Dad might order a mai tai). And it could have been at Little Szechwan that Allison had to explain to Mom the right way to read the fortune in a fortune cookie.

Shrimp with velvet sauce is sounding awfully good right now.