Our story starts one cold December evening, two weeks before Christmas and one week before the traditional family trip up to Pittsburg. I was alone in the house that evening, my parents had taken my sisters out to get new decorations for the tree after the last years great kitten debacle, and I was left with the daunting task of making enough cookies for the extended family that I would be trapped with in less than seven days with a recipe that I had no hope to ever being able to read. It is an old Italian recipe, one passed down through the family; translated more times than I, or anyone else for that matter, can count, it is expected that whoever makes the cookies that year makes them properly, so I was left wondering why anyone had thought that leaving me, the kid who set microwavable ramen noodles on fire not two months ago, in charge of making over a hundred cookies was a grand idea. So, there I was a fourteen-year-old kid about to tackle the biggest challenge of her life, reading directions that were over a hundred years old and about as easily understandable as a doctor’s prescription written in cursive.

‘One cup of flour, three cups of sugar, two cups of water, not too difficult,’ I thought to myself as I preheated the oven to the temperature indicated on the recipe. That list became my mantra as I measured out each ingredient and added them into the others. As I scooped the raw dough onto the cookie sheet I thought to myself, ‘This seems a little watery,’ but who was I to question the family recipe – so I continued. I decided that they probably just needed to set up a little in the fridge, so I covered the bowl, moved a few things around, and placed them to, hopefully, set.

When the timer I set for the oven went off, I jumped up from where I was reading a book on the French Revolution and sprinted into the kitchen. I just stopped myself from grabbing the cookies, if you could call them that, out of the oven with my bare hands when my phone went off, I jumped as the sound of the Imperial March echoed through the house. My dad, the only person whose ringer I had set to that obnoxious, ear shattering volume, was calling me. Panicked, because that is what one does when one’s father calls them, I high-tailed it up to my room, leaving the oven not only open but the cookies still inside; which would have consequences later I assure you, to answer his call. As I spoke to him about what we planned to get my mom for Christmas, the smoke detector went off, the cookies, I had forgotten all about them, I said a quick goodbye to my father and raced back downstairs hoping beyond hope that he had not heard the alarm going off.
Needless to say, the cookies that I had so painstakingly forgotten about were nothing like the fluffy, almond cookies of my childhood. These cookies were the Stephen King version of my childhood: they melted together to form one single cookie, that was burnt around the edges and still raw near the middle; they were more sugar than cookie, and drier than the Sahara Desert. It was a disaster. I had single handedly ruined my family’s oldest tradition. 

I had to try again. I decided that it would not be my mistake that would ruin Christmas and threw out the ruined cookies and the offending still watery cookie dough. I picked up the monstrosity that was the old recipe and decided that I would figure out why the cookies did not work the first time around. That very moment I realized I read the recipe wrong. It was not three cups of sugar one cup of flour, it was three cups of flour, one cup of sugar. So, I fixed my recipe and made the cookies again, but when I tested the new cookies, although they were perfect, they were bland and boring, not what I wanted in a Christmas cookie. I set the dough off to the side and decided that I would experiment with the dough. I kept the bones of the recipe and scrapped everything else, I ended up with cookies that were either red or green colored and shaped like Christmas trees that tasted like almonds, vanilla, and orange. They were the best cookies that I had had in a while, and when it came time for my family to try them, my thoughts were mirrored. I had single handedly saved Christmas, and given myself a job for the next hundred or so years to come.