Corona Christmas - Cookies

So Christmas has always been a big deal in my Norwegian-American family (which is one reason why associating it with the anniversary of my mom's death has been so incredibly hard).

Perhaps nothing was more important to my mother than the Christmas baking. She had a standard list of two dozen or so standard cookies and quick breads she would make. They were always the same — chocolate drop, santa's crisp, nut goodie bars, (incredibly potent) bourbon balls, lemon meringue, chocolate mint brownies, English toffee, thumbprint, pecan balls, and more (never enough chocolate, in my opinion). Baking started in November, when we would start to fill the freezer with tupperware containers filled with cookies, each with a wax paper sheet carefully between layers.

Then there were the Scandinavian standards, all of which incited a lot of swearing as she made them: rosettes, krumkake, sanbakkel. It's only later I knew there were other ways — here's the krumkake I made last night, with the electric grill.

I have so many memories of these cookies. Making them late at night. Bringing in plates of them for my teachers every year — I was gobstruck when Beatrix started school and I found out most people give gift cards. Negotiating that my bedtime snack was as many cookies as I was years old. Freezing my fingers as I pulled out the tupperware from the freezer to make the cookie trays. Using the same tupperware year after year with the kind of cookie carefully written on white tape in my mom's handwriting (beware if you ever thought a cool whip container in the freezer was really cool whip).

The first Christmas after my mother died I was 7.5 months pregnant and could barely handle Christmas, much less the baking. And so I tend to the cookie exchange idea, and luckily I was rich with friends who liked to do them. Over the past years my go-to has been to make a huge batch of chocolate mint brownies (my favorite, see above note on chocolate), and then go the the neighborhood exchange, my friend Erica's exchange, my Saint Paul women's exchange, any exchange I could. As Beatrix has gotten older and joined Norwegian dance, they have always done a baking day as well, so we get all the Norwegian treats!

This year, though, that was all off. No Norwegian dance, and of course no cookie exchange holiday gatherings. Until I played around with the idea of a socially distant exchange, and my amazing friend Kate sent up google sheets and made maps, and suddenly it was on!

Some people combined stops — this was my porch yesterday:

It meant that yesterday I got to drive around, listening to holiday music and picking up cookies. It was in no way the same as an exchange gathering. But it was a way to have some kind of normalcy in a Christmas tradition that has already been interrupted too much. And for that I am profoundly grateful.

(I broke a rule, I made a whole new recipe, because again, I wanted more chocolate. And they were good!)