The Sugarplum Table ~ by Kristine Raymond

I have boatloads of favorite memories from my childhood and most of them revolve around food.  Mom was a stay-at-home mom who embraced, with open arms, her profession as homemaker.  Every meal was homemade; every dessert baked in her own kitchen, not store-bought.  (I remember trading freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies for my classmates' Chips Ahoy.  But that's a different story.)

Mom was, and is, a great cook.  I swear, every time I call her to chat, she's in the kitchen.  So, I have many stories that I could tell that relate to some feast or another, or a cooking mishap, but what I'd like to share today, in the spirit of the season, is a most-cherished memory that began each year on December first.

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Though she excelled at cooking, baking was Mom's passion.  From birthday and wedding cakes, to pies and creme puffs and strudel, the woman is a master with flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.  It was those ingredients, among others, that lined the counter after the dinner dishes were washed and put away.  With Christmas music playing merrily in the background, Mom would open her well-worn copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook and begin measuring.

Each night, from the first day of the month until a few days before Christmas, Mom would bake a different variety of cookie.  Sometimes she had help in the form of little hands that made more of a mess than any sort of actual baking but she was patient as she taught my sisters and me how to measure and mix and roll out dough to just the right thickness.  And on the nights she made sugar or gingerbread cookies, we had the extra excitement of decorating them.  

With weeks to go before Christmas, the only way for the cookies to stay fresh was to freeze them.  She'd line shirt gift boxes with tinfoil and waxed paper and layer the treats gently until they reached the top.  Then she'd lower the lid, taping the boxes shut - to discourage any early sampling - and store them in the huge chest freezer we kept in the basement.   Hmmm...looking back, I guess that was also to discourage us from getting into the cookies.  Nicely played, Mom.  Nicely played.

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So, night after night, Mom labored in the hot kitchen while carols played and the aroma of freshly-baked cookies filled the house until, finally, it was Christmas Eve.  Now, there was no way she was going to open those boxes and let us kids stick our grubby hands in.  Oh, no.  Her hard work deserved the proper presentation and that's when the fun started.

At six pm on the dot - I know this because, as the youngest of my siblings, I was tasked with watching the clock, usually beginning at 4 pm...lol - Mom would unveil the Sugarplum Table.  What, for the other fifty-one weeks out of the year, was merely a brown, wooden coffee table, it had been transformed into a confectionery buffet.   Plates piled high with iced and decorated sugar cookies, gingerbread men, thumbprint cookies, peanut butter 'Kiss' cookies, chocolate chip cookies, meringue cookies, Spritz cookies, and my absolute favorite - bon bon cookies. For as many times as I used the word 'cookies' in the previous sentence, there at least twice that many varieties laid out in front of four, eager young children.  After all, we'd waited a month for this moment.  Now our patience was to be rewarded.  Well, sort of.

There was no way Mom was going to allow us to gorge ourselves, not to mention this 'feast' had to last until New Year's, so we were each permitted to choose one cookie - two, if we pleaded hard enough - to mark the beginning of our Christmas festivities.  As our eyes moved from plate to plate, mouths watering, we weighed our options, debating, reasoning, making our choice, then changing our minds.  

Chocolate chip cookies are yummy, but Mom makes those all of the time.  No reason to start off with one of those.  Oooh...I decorated that gingerbread man.  Maybe I should eat him first.  Nah, he's too cute.

Spritz cookies!  I wait all year for those.  But wait!  How about a chewy coconut meringue cookie?  Or a thumbprint cookie?  I know, a bon bon!

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Copyright ©Depositphotos

Choice made, that first bite was heavenly.  The second bite wasn't too shabby, either.  And the best part?  The same spread awaited us every day for a solid week.  Our cookie limit was also lifted, though we knew better than to over-indulge.  No one wants a stomachache during Christmas vacation.





There are a lot of family traditions that I wanted to pass down if I'd had kids, and the Sugarplum Table was at the top of the list.  As it turned out, life had other plans for me but, today, I'm passing it on to you.  Maybe you already incorporate something similar into your holiday traditions or maybe it's the first you've ever heard of such a thing.  Either way, remember to always make time to make memories.  They're sweeter than any treat on the Sugarplum Table.

Oh, and by the way, I'm the proud owner of that Betty Crocker cookbook.  The cover is falling off and there are smudges on the pages but the recipes - and my love for them - are the same as they were back in that kitchen all those Decembers while I was growing up.

Copyright © Kristine Raymond