The Two Main Ingredients Are Molasses & Regret
Christmas cookies that manifest healing, or something
Christmas is complicated, in that the notion of it is exciting and heartwarming but in practice it is mostly a six-week nightmare that culminates in a burst of fun that is over in approximately 30 mins, and then for your trouble you get to do fucking New Year’s, the stupidest invention humans have ever conjured.
The entire thing is an elaborate scam. It’s sort of like if you went through the rigmarole of going to a big concert—fighting traffic and navigating security and stumbling over people’s beers en route to your seats to wait two hours for the show to start while desperately needing to pee—and then when the artist finally takes the stage they abruptly leave after the opening number. I paid $3700 and am now a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster and all I get is an opening number?! That’s Christmas.
Actually the more accurate analogy would be if you went through all that for someone else because let’s be real, all this Christmas shit is for other people. We all love a tree, a string of lights, a good Christmas movie and a cookie or 93, but the rest of this shit? You’re doing it because if you don’t your kids will cry or your wife will leave you or your mother will lash out because the resentment-fueled production of a Martha Stewart Christmas is all that is holding her together anymore. It’s either force Christmas or go to therapy for her, and a Boomer willing to go to therapy? Baby that’s a cryptid, light the Yule log!
My ultimate goal in life is to finally find a stinky hairy lumberjack named, like, Brett or something equally fucking stupid and never see another face between Black Friday and Christmas ever again for the rest of my life. I will put up a tree for him (by which I mean for me, with those stringy icicles because I love a tacky Christmas tree—I love a tacky Christmas tree! Christmas trees should be tacky and if you disagree, you are A Certain Kind of Person and respectfully, GO DO THAT SHIT SOMEWHERE ELSE), and I will cook him an elaborate Christmas dinner because I love doing shit I’m good at that gets me lots of attention.
And yes, our entire life will be lit only by candles and the whole house will smell like pine boughs Brett cut down by hand and I’ll bake the dog some kind of dog cake in the shape of a fucking snowflake or some shit because one thing about me? I’m gay.
But what I am NOT doing is traveling, socializing or going shopping. I will burn this house down around us before I agree to any of that shit, so it’s just you and me, Beefcake.
Your “gift” is a blowjob under the tree and a Christmas morning breakfast of whatever stale sugar cookies have not disintegrated into dust in the Currier & Ives tin next to the air fryer because I ain’t doing shit for the next two weeks but sit on my ass watching Bridget Jones’ Diary with brandy in my egg nog, and anybody whose name isn’t on the deed to this mountain cabin (oh—it’s a mountain cabin, me and stinky hairy lumberjack live in a mountain cabin) who tries to darken its doorstep between December 15 and the first Monday after New Year’s will be shot in the head by the hunting rifle we keep on the porch in case a bear comes, I don’t care if it is your mother.
And speaking of New Year’s, don’t come in here giving me that guff either. I don’t care what anyone says, nobody actually enjoys celebrating New Year’s unless they are a very specific genre of person, the type who “isn’t political” and “mostly just likes animated movies” and is still saying “I don’t get Twitter, like who cares what you had for lunch?” in almost-2023, after a reality TV host dismantled a democracy almost solely via tweet.
These are the same people so wildly uncomfortable with anything remotely this side of milquetoast that they get thrown off and say “wow, tell us how you really feel!” any time you have something even approaching an opinion on anything. “Obama was fine but I wish he hadn’t left all those judicial openings.” “Wow, tell us how you really feel!” “Comic book movies are fine but I just really miss the mid-budget film for adults, you know?” “Wow, tell us how you really feel!” “A bit chilly out there.” “Wow someone’s cranky today did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed who pissed in your cheerios tell us how you really feel!”
Young Sheldon fans, Disney Adults, people who go to New York and come home raving about the Times Square Olive Garden—these are the idiots, the buffoons, the epsilon-minus semi-morons who sincerely love New Year’s. The rest of us are either sprawled on a couch housing pizza rolls while hurling homophobic invective at Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper as God intended, or at a party praying for a Y2K-level disaster that kicks off the purge and saves us from having to endure another New Year’s ever again.
Maybe—maybe—if New Year’s fell on March 23rd or August 17th it would be fun, but tacked onto the Yuletide whirlwind? Not one time have I awoken on a December 31st when I had actual plans and not immediately begun begging Christ for an aortic aneurysm. Enough is enough, and it was already enough by high noon on Christmas Day, and if stinky hairy lumberjack ever asks me to do fuck-all on New Year’s he’ll find himself frozen stiff in one of the mountain cabin’s snowbanks like DiCaprio dangling off that Titanic shiplap. Now put another log on the fire and snuggle me for the 17-second window before I shove you off me because your body heat is making me too hot in excelsis deo.
Problem is, I do not own a mountain cabin, nor do I own a stinky hairy lumberjack, all I actually own is a 2009 Honda CR-V that does that squealing shit cars do when a belt is going bad. And so until such time that a mountain cabin and complementary gay cliche arrive, my yearly tradition is to sublimate my distaste for the exhausting parts of Christmas the way I sublimate all my other feelings, which is by eating things with my mouth.
Cookies were a huge part of Christmas in my house growing up. Every year once December 1st rolled around my mom turned into Mary fucking Berry, baking approximately 837 batches of 10 different varieties of cookies which she would intricately arrange on decorative plates wrapped in Christmas-printed cellophane and hand out to practically everyone she knew—neighbors, coworkers, the pastor, her hairdresser, foisting them on anyone who happened to drop by, hurling them at the windows of adjacent cars at red lights. The woman simply could not get enough of handing out cookies, which was weird because she fucking hated making them with the incandescent rage of an agitated viper.
Every Saturday for weeks she would end up hurling measuring spoons or hand-mixer beaters or a handful of spritz cookie molds into the kitchen sink while shrieking, “This is SUPPOSED to be FUN!!!” and bursting into tears. This was usually preceded by me applying green and red decorative sugars in proportions that didn’t perfectly adhere to the Fibonacci sequence or any other of the myriad ways you can fuck up cookies when the person you’re making cookies with has made cookies their entire personality, which would result in a screaming fight in which I would shriek with all of my pre-teen might “IF YOU! DON’T! LIKE IT! THEN! DO IT! YOURSEEEEEELF!!!” while bent at the waist as if yelling into a maritime gale.
This would prompt her to launch into a Dorinda Medley “I MADE IT NICE!” tirade and then like clockwork here it would come, you can feel it, rumbling under the ugly kitchen carpet, thar she blows! I’d mouth along behind her back, “tHiS iS sUpPoSeD tO bE fUn!!!,” spoons hurled, tears spilled, rolling pin plowed over dough with the blood-curdling urgency of a woman with nowhere to turn, smash to black, cut and scene! The audience claps, Faye Dunaway opens the envelope, “And the Oscar goes to: Terms Of Endearment But With Christmas Cookies and Undiagnosed Bipolar Disorder!,” the auditorium explodes into a standing ovation, Nicole Kidman does Nicole Kidman Clapping.
You know that scene in Steel Magnolias where Julia Roberts tells Sally Field she’s pregnant while Sally cracks eggs into a bowl with visceral rage? Nobody has ever so perfectly captured the anal retentive control freak tendencies of my mother, except it takes exponentially less than the death of her child to make her have a full-scale cemetery meltdown.
Anyway, each year whether I have Christmas plans or not I like to bake something from childhood to, you know, conjure up some cheer or whatever. I used to try my hand at one of my mom’s myriad varietals of Christmas cookie, an endeavor that is admittedly pathological: I began doing this the first Christmas after my mom decided to become estranged, a fact so eye-rollingly maudlin it makes me want to drink bleach. A gay man trying to connect to his estranged mother by baking her Christmas cookies? That is a gay Hallmark Christmas movie written by straight people and starring Jim Parsons. It’s camp.
Nonetheless, the endeavor did make me feel close to her—or at least it made me feel like it made me feel close to her. But interestingly, the cookies never turned out. The same has happened with her Southern family’s iconic cornbread dressing—I made it perfectly a good half-dozen times in my 20s, but ever since we parted ways I have yet to make it successfully (including last year’s disaster). It’s always too wet or too dry or over-salted or under-saged or something, as if the universe or the ~*spirit guides*~ or the fucking Roman god of cookery or whatever are telling me to just hang it up and move on.
Similarly, when I decided to attempt the little red, white and green twisted candy-cane cookies she’d make every year out of a salty-sweet almond-flavored dough, they were a catastrophe. The decorative sugars melted into a syrup that adhered them to the cookie sheet like industrial epoxy, rendering them impossible to remove in anything but dusty chunks. I remember dejectedly munching a few salvageable shards while thinking I should call her and ask how she avoided this, before abruptly remembering that wasn’t an option and scraping them into the garbage while rolling my eyes at the on-the-nose symbolism.
The following Christmas, trying to think what I could make that wasn’t my mom’s, I remembered my other favorite Christmas cookies from childhood, my Aunt Kris’s molasses cookies, spicy little cakes with a dollop of jam baked into the middle that were so fucking delicious my cousins and I used to fight over them. Every year my older cousin Teri demanded a designated Ziploc bag of them with her name Sharpied onto it, which she’d clutch to her chest while bellowing, “Get off my goddamn cookies it’s not my fault you ate all yours” at a group of supplicants that included her own children. These cookies are not a fucking joke.
I called my aunt and asked for the recipe, and to my surprise found out it actually came from my French Canadian great-great-grandmother. Suddenly they took on all new contours. Things may have been broken with my parents, but I could still claim a bit of my Christmas culinary birthright by making Grandma Labelle’s molasses joints.
I quickly found that having Aunt Kris-cum-Grandma Labelle’s recipe meant more to me anyway. My mother had been my whole world for most of my life, but the fracture between us sparked a sort of unraveling that made me realize what Aunt Kris had actually been to me during my upbringing—the only person who made me feel safe, the only person I never had to hide from, the only person who seemed to genuinely like me as I was. She both liked and loved me, and because of who I was, not despite it. “Ah ha,” I thought, “this is how I survived.”
When I came out to her, I braced for a response like my parents’ rejection and zealotry and disappointment, but instead she just said, “Oh I don’t believe in all that anyway.” Then her voice took on a sort of heaviness, an urgency. “I just want you to be happy. I want you to find what makes you happy, whatever it is, whoever. I pray for it every day.”
Her tone was laden with subtext that blew my cover—she’d known, even though we had fallen out of regular touch, that I wasn’t okay and hadn’t been for a long time and maybe hadn’t ever been. I stood in silence for a bit and finally just said, “thanks,” because it’s a bit tongue-tying, being seen for the first time.
Aunt Kris was kind and soft and gentle and warm, smart and erudite and acerbic and hilarious with a booming guttural cackle that filled the air to its very atoms. She was incisively sardonic, sparingly but deliciously profane, a virtuoso at withering glances and sarcastic wisecracks, the type of woman who’d answer her husband’s queries about why she can’t get up and get her own wine by deadpanning, “Because I’m a hothouse flower.”
My #1 childhood delight was to act as buffoonish as possible so she’d finally guffaw and bellow, “You fool” the way the corny jokes and put-on bickering from the love of her life, my Uncle Jim, would make her burst out laughing and boom, “You horse’s ass.” She was Dorothy Zbornak with a Michigan accent, right down to the propensity for hollering zingers when her nerves were frayed in a way that left the entire house doubled over.
One Memorial Day when she had a house full of friends and neighbors and my six cousins and all their families, the skies opened up and the kitchen ceiling in her ancient house started leaking like a sieve. While she scrambled around putting pots down on the floor, my cousin Tammy suddenly warned, “Wait what if one of these toddlers comes in here and trips,” to which Aunt Kris glared up at her with her hooded Bette Davis eyes and bellowed, “SUPPOSIN’ I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS—LET ‘EM,” punctuating the final word by slamming a saucepan beneath a trickle of rainwater and sending half the house into hysterics.
Supposin’?
Supposin’.
I am convinced to this day nobody this side of 1955 could ever successfully land a “Supposin,’” but she could.
I’m going to keep going because what else do we have to do.
A thing I think about practically every time I’m in a parking lot: We were going to the store during a snowstorm that made for a harrowing drive, the type that fills the car with white-knuckle, electric silence. As we finally pulled up to a parking space, another car swooped in and stole it, and suddenly the anxious quiet snapped like dry wood as Aunt Kris boomed from the diaphragm “GET OUT OF MY PARKING SPACE YOU BITCH,” the first four words run together from the throat as “GETATTAMY,” the final rendered “BETCH” by her Northern Michigan vowels and punctuated with so much rage it seemed like they might crack clean through the windshield.
Part of comedy is tension and release, and once the car was parked she joined me in laughing until we were almost sick, the windows fogging from our gasps. That sort of rage can be scary in other hands, of course, but she was so loving and warm and her fury so contra how she treated everyone that there was never a lack of clarity about where her ire was directed—at the heavens, at the indignity and injustice of having to live alongside all these assholes. Occasionally by way of clarification she’d spit, “I’m not yelling at you, I’m just yelling” (a phrase that comes out of my own mouth all the time) but rarely was the clarification needed. It usually just made us laugh harder.
She was an expert shit-talker, too. Once when I relayed that the only non-A on my report card was in gym, she cracked, “Yes well, sports have always been something at which you excel.” That probably sounds mean, but I always say 50% of my sense of humor is from her, and that’s because somehow she knew I got humor the way she got humor, even if I was just 8 or 11 or 15. We had an understanding, and rather than hurt my feelings it made me feel accepted, and seen, and like I was hers. She always treated me like I was hers. There were plenty of times when that saved me, and the older I get the more I understand she knew exactly what she was doing.
The day she gave me the recipe was a few months after Aunt Kris and I had our only fight in my entire life. We’d never said a cross word to each other besides moments of childhood brattiness, because it wasn’t who she was. But these are trying times for family bonds, and the propaganda that has magnified all of our philosophical differences in recent years got the best of even Aunt Kris and me one day. I started it, and I don’t know that I’ll ever finish regretting it.
My phone call to get this cookie recipe was the first time we spoke since the fight, and I’d assumed once again that she’d react the way my family members tend to react to conflict—manipulating some kind of penance, writing me off, playing some kind of game. Instead, the conversation was like old times. Parental rejection will have you reasoning that unconditional love must be something only children get. You end up always braced for people to renege on you. I needn’t have worried about Aunt Kris, which I realize is how relationships go when people aren’t broken. I am trying to internalize this.
In any case she emailed me the recipe, telling me I should have it as a piece of family history if nothing else. She wrote it with her usual succinct, no-nonsense prose—“mix using standard cookie recipe,” assuming I knew what that meant—and a bit of teasing wit, like always. I read it now and can hear her delivering it—the way she would have said the part about spraying the measuring cup with Pam so the molasses “slides right out” (which doesn’t work, incidentally, and she would have argued with me about it), her thundering all-caps “GOOD LUCK” at the end, her way of letting me know these cookies are a pain in the ass. A satisfying and delicious pain in the ass, but a pain in the ass all the same.
Aunt Kris passed away last year on December 12, just days before she and Uncle Jim put on their annual Christmas party for their enormous family. I was living in London when she died, and had passed up two opportunities to visit with her, in person before I left and by phone after I’d gone. It had been years since we’d had our differences, but there’d been a cautiousness between us ever since that would have been unthinkable before and that I found difficult to take, partly because I knew I owed her an apology I couldn’t bring myself to make. It made our fallibility too real.
I also sensed time was running out, and I couldn’t bear to give in to the possibility. Like if I just shrugged it off, stayed breezy, kept the stakes low and didn’t say this uncomfortable thing, it wouldn’t happen and it wouldn’t matter. I remember exactly where I was when I got the news that it had and it did, down to the shapes of the leaves sticking to the wet pavement I was walking on when my phone dinged and that door closed forever. A part of me will always be stuck there, on that London street, a bit of vapor in the air. That’s how these things always feel to me, anyway.
Aunt Kris’s death brought my London stint to an abrupt end, and in the disorienting intermission between her funeral and Christmas it seemed like the thing to do to make her cookies again. No, let me be honest—it felt like if I didn’t make the fucking cookies the world would implode, it felt like she’d never know what she meant because I never had the balls to tell her, it felt like nothing will ever be right again because I gave up my chances to fix it so make the woman’s cookies for fuck’s sake make the goddamn cookies for once in your life do the right fucking thing and make the goddamn cookies.
It didn’t work. The butter was too fatty and I didn’t properly chill the dough and they spread all over the tray, like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. They tasted okay, but they weren’t right. And they certainly weren’t hers. Which seemed fitting.
Last week was a year since she passed, and I still don’t know quite how to talk about it. How do you verbalize the loss of the one person who loved you well? Probably, you can’t. See, that’s how they get you.
Instead, I made her cookies again—just for the sake of it, figuring they’d once again be a bit of a dog’s dinner, I’d eat a couple and throw the rest out and wherever she is she can roast me like she did the first time. I thought about her the whole time, deftly cracking eggs one-handed because her left hand was clamped shut by a stroke in her 20s, dragging herself when she couldn’t find the measuring spoons right under her nose—“God, you big dummy,”—complaining the kitchen was “hotter than the hubs of hell” with the oven on. I cut no corners and took my time and to my surprise they came out almost like hers. Not quite, but close.
Since they turned out I boxed some up and shipped them to Uncle Jim, knowing he’d be missing her, and them. He called my Dad almost in tears when they arrived, and sent me a message about how they were just like he remembered, just like hers. In a bizarre twist I’m finding hard to believe is real, he passed away two days later, one year and six days after Aunt Kris. I am prone to see symbolism and mysticism and hidden meaning in everything, so grain of salt, but… well, I don’t really have to say it, do I.
Anyway, I thought I would pass them on to you as well, just in case you also need a project to get you through the next couple days, or another excuse to run the oven while it’s frigid outside.
Or maybe you just need something to do with your hands so you don’t lash your in-laws to the Christmas tree with an extension cord and flick a match over your shoulder like Angela Bassett.
We can’t have you doing that, because then you’d miss out on all the fun of New Year’s. And everybody loves New Year’s, we’ve already been over this.
So make the goddamn cookies.
Take the chances. Say the things. And make the goddamn cookies. Even if they’re not perfect.
The Two Main Ingredients Are Molasses & Regret
I didn’t know about your Aunt Kris, and I’m so glad you had someone who saw you. I might just make her cookies while I’m holed up trying to get through the holidays.
That’s beautiful ❤️