At the darkest time of year, we bake our pain and loss into something to pass to others when it becomes too much to carry.
For my mom, the weeks before Christmas exist solely for baking cookies.
She stocks up on butter all through the fall, buying pounds of it and filling her second freezer. When I was growing up in Illinois, it served as a shelf for all the Tupperwares of cookies to perch on in precarious stacks, staying fresh in the icy garage. Our pantry overflowed with bags of flour, brown sugar, pecans, chocolate chips.
Early one December morning I would hear the stereo start playing something awful — the holiday albums of Jimmy Buffett, Mannheim Steamroller — and know that it had begun. The stereo was never used at any other time in our house. I’d come downstairs, the light barely leaking through Chicago winter’s overcast dome, and find her apron-clad, dusted in flour, in a frenzy. I would use my tiny fingers to “help,” placing the Red Hot buttons on the snowmen, but mostly I got in the way. By the end of a day of baking my mom would be frazzled, exhausted, leaving me plenty of opportunities to pinch dough from the mixer, cementing my love of all things grainy, chewy, unbaked.
As I got older, I couldn’t understand this cookie madness. We weren’t little kids anymore, jonesing for sprinkles and projects. Surely she could scale back the baking. So many days of mixing and rolling and cutting and decorating, so many hundreds of cookies, arranged on plates and wrapped in layers of red and green Saran wrap, to be delivered by my dad to neighbors and friends on Christmas Eve, a day when most households are already saturated with sugar. What was even the point?
In this year of stalled time, of unending news and numbers of deaths, of hospital beds filling and conspiracy theories brewing, as December loomed I found myself desperate for something to get me through the year. My dad’s mom, Mary, my last grandparent, died during the fall after many terrifying trips in and out of the hospital with pneumonia. She never got Covid, but for months I lived in fear that she might. I tried to call her and rarely got through. During her memorial service, at a cemetery bordered by Route 17 in Dwight, Ill., her coffin took up one of the Zoom squares and the whine of trucks cut out the sound of the pastor’s David Lynch voice.
Two weeks after my grandma died, her daughter Carol died suddenly and unexpectedly at 63. Again, my family sat through a Zoom memorial service, clutching our grief through the screen. This death from afar had no paper program to fold or wooden pew to steady me or clammy hands to shake. No heady soap or perfume smells, no mothballs or bad breath. With these contactless funerals, it’s almost as if the deaths never happened. The memories can’t imprint.
Left cold by the bodiless, two-dimensional loss, I began retreating into the three-dimensional world. I inherited all of my aunt’s knitting, her gigantic collection of mohair yarns. Knitting, something I had tried and failed to learn years ago, re-entered my life as a balm when I most needed something to do with my hands. Studying the fuzzy yarn, the hand-dyed magentas and Smurf blues and chartreuses, the orange that is a dead match for two of our cats, I marveled at my aunt’s choices. I’d always thought of Carol as my favorite aunt but I suddenly saw how little I really knew her, and how much I wish I had. She mailed us all scarves she’d made for Christmas several years in a row, and I mocked them. Now I walk around the house draped in them, squeezing them, missing the very idea of closeness.
The holidays are a time of grief for many people, when losses bubble up and balk at the meager attempts we make at cheer. I’ve never gotten it before. In this, the year of no gathering, those who are long lost or suddenly missing seem to have shown up early. For the first time I understand the holidays as something I need to get through the year. I cling to the twinkle lights, the snowflakes, any semblance of sparkle.
As my state, New Mexico, locked down in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I found myself searching the internet for butter, sugar, flour, sprinkles, fearful I might not get the quantities I needed after the latest wave of hoarding began. My mom had already finished her first 48 nutcups, a family recipe for the tiniest pecan pies, and decided to skip the kolachkys, Slovak crescent pastries with jam in the center, the kind I hated as a kid. Soon she’d be pressing green almond dough into her spritz gun with green dyed fingers and enlisting my dad to help sprinkle the wreaths.
And I, meanwhile, have abandoned my computer, my responsibilities, my bathing routine, and am scrambling from the oven to the wire rack with tray after tray of gingersnaps, crumbling piñon rosemary shortbread trees, lemon sugar cats. I am pressing my hands into dough, relishing the slap of sugar aerating butter against the side of the bowl, the papery crush of chocolate as the blade of the knife slides down it.
The thing about grief, big and small, is that it’s ordinary. We carry our losses in our bodies, they say, deep in the tissues of our hips, our shoulders, and each new loss we experience calls up all our previous losses. We can dissolve some of this grief by moving, working it out, stretching it out, talking it out, crying it out, but can’t we also roll it out on a lightly floured countertop, shape it with our hands into something small and delicate and crisp?
All these cookies and cards and gifts are also ways we hand off our pain and our loss at the darkest time of year, bake it into something to pass to others we love, share it when it becomes too much to carry. My mom’s cookies are the way she remembers her mother, the only real grieving she seems to allow herself, once a year, music blaring, oven beeping, singing “How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?”
It is her chance to remember, a performance mimicking her mom’s, acting out her sorrow, dusting it with powdered sugar, dotting it with jam.
Like Penelope, weaving and unweaving night and day for her husband lost at sea, the only way I know to get through the year is to keep my hands moving. I’m not trying to busy it away, or ignore it, but to let myself feel it. The doing is where the feeling can happen.
When our bodies are busy our minds can rest, reflect in the repetitive motion. My need for projects is genetic. The squish of dough, the plush of wool in my hands are the best forms of solace.
I escape the dark days, snub my phone, and sink into mess, into tangibility, into texture, my glasses fogged from the oven and cellophane bags of cookies in each hand.
Jenn Shapland lives in New Mexico and is the author of “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” a finalist for the National Book Award.
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Butter, Sugar and a Tablespoon of Grief - The New York Times
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