This is my littlest, my youngest, my seca leche.

Yes, I realize he’s enormous for his four years, but he’s still a baby in my eyes.

Just today when we were watching the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy dreams she goes to Scotland where she gets captured by the townsfolk, falls in love with her prison guard (Ricky) who then feeds her to a two-headed dragon (Ethel and Fred), my little baby climbed up into my lap, lower lip a-tremble, wrapped his arms around my neck, and buried his face in my shoulder. I laughed at him. And then I covered his neck and cheeks with a flurry of kisses.

It’s odd how your youngest child, no matter what age, has the sweetest and softest skin but as soon as you have another, fresher babe, the older child’s skin suddenly feels all grown-up, scabby, stinky, and sticky. I remember noticing this when Nickel was born. Rosy little Sweetsie (who was just turning two that month) no longer felt nearly so sweet and tender.

When Yo-Yo was Nickel’s age, he was already the oldest of three. In my eyes, he was a full-grown big kid with no traces of sweet baby soft left on him.

But Nickel’s stinky, rough, nicked-up skin will always feel soft as peaches to me. As the last inhabitant of my womb, he is doomed to be my baby for forevermore and beyond.

And let me tell you, no child was ever better suited for the role. He is a Mama’s Boy like none other, going out of his way to kiss me smack-dab on the lips and brush his eyelashes against my cheeks for bedtime butterfly kisses. He curls up in my lap like a baby, pats my cheeks, and strokes the soft skin under my chin (which drives me nuts because that skin does not need any help getting more pliable and stretchy). In fact, he smothers me with so much hands-on loving (right now he’s laying on the floor playing with my feet, hoisting them up in the air, pulling, pushing, making it nearly impossible to work the keyboard) that at least once a day I find myself on the verge of a panic attack, shrugging him off, gasping for air, and pleading (in good moments) or bellowing (in bad) for him to stop touching me NOW!

Sometimes, in the middle of nothing, he’ll burst forth with a heartfelt “I love you, Mama.” It makes me melt every time.

He has an unabashed zest for life, this child of mine. For example, at our church the kids are sometimes called upon to collect the offering—to just wander the isles and, when an adult flashes cash, to take it and walk it up to the baskets that sit up front. Nickel treats this venture like a full-contact sport, crouching down low, jutting his elbows out, and then zigzagging at top speed towards the prize. When Nickel collects the offering, I feel like I’m sitting in bleachers in a stadium instead of in a sanctuary.

While he has inflicted me with a fair number of head-butts and elbow jabs, more often than not it is Nickel that bears the brunt of his own intensity.

Look at that scratch on his forehead. None of us knows from where it came but it’s big and scabby and makes a pretty loud statement. Which is: I AM A BRUISER. WATCH OUT.

Check out his left eyelid. See how it’s swollen and bluish green? Something happened—again, we’re not sure what—but that mark didn’t materialize out of thin air.

And look at that gnarly thumbnail. It’s the new one, a huge improvement over the old—the one he took a hammer to.

Forgive him his too-small jeans. You can’t tell from the picture, but they are so tight that they give him full-time wedge-y love. Every time he goes to the bathroom, he has to get me to snap them shut. It makes me feel bloated and fat just to look at him.

P.S. This popcorn was made for the purpose of prettying up the tree. But when I went to thread the needles, I realized that I had none and the ones that Miss Beccaboo brought down from her room had such small eyes that they were impossible to thread. Only two needles got successfully threaded, and then I poked the butt end of ones of the needles into my thumb and, a few kernels later, the pointy end pierced my finger. Then I quit.

This same time, years previous: scholarly stuff

I have been inspired to do some elving. It’s all because of Amanda, a (what appears to be) mellow mom of four, an unschooler, a knitter, a maker of many things, a savor-er of the mundane. I read her blog and then find myself doing odd things like spending an hour on the phone trying to find a store that sells empty lip balm containers (homemade peppermint lip balm coming right up!), painting twigs with glitter paint, and emailing a friend to see if she’ll give me knitting lessons.

“Elving” is the word that Amanda uses for the festive Christmas preparations. I love that noun turned verb so much that I had to take it for a spin. After just a couple days of elving (and more to come), I’m pleased to report that, even though I’m the opposite of mellow (and then some), it has taken us all for a pleasant ride. Elving is here to stay! Hooray!

So, without further ado, I present to you—dum, dum, da-DUM—The Elving Chronicles!

Bit O’ Magic Number One: Twigs
They got collected and chopped up.

I turned my sticks sparkly and, as soon as I get a glue gun (and add “Martha” to my middle name), I’ll turn them into little stars for the tree.

The kids took a bundle of sticks into the downstairs bedroom and, with the help of elastic ponytail holders and some gauzy-type stuff, built a little house for baby Jesus and fam (who have yet to make their appearance).

Bit O’ Magic Number Two: Citrus
Oranges, lemons, and limes (and today, red and white grapefruit) got sliced and dried.

Miss Beccaboo and I worked together to tie them with ribbons in preparation for their coming out party on the Christmas tree.

Which brings me to…

Bit O’ Magic Number Three: The Tree
We have a tree! Finally, finally, we got around to finding enough gloves and hats so that the whole family could tromp out in the cold at the same time. After a day of standing naked in front of the window (well, except for briefly featuring our household’s entire toy collection…

…including some plastic fried eggs)

it sports its first glittery coat. (Stages, you know.)

Bit O’ Magic Number Four: Candles
I’m a candle freak under normal circumstances, burning my way through up to a dozen votives on the drearier months, but come December, I go all out.

Nothing less than a forest of glimmering brightness will do, with a few cranberries thrown in for good cheer.

What elving is happening in your neck of the woods?

This same time, years previous: a pragmatic man, cranberry-white chocolate cookies, a mutilated finger, and the procedure

Eleven days to Christmas and still no snow and no tree.

Both absences are causing my second daughter much anxiety. She stands in front of the door, gazing forlornly out at our back yard that has turned into a barren wasteland, plaintively asking, “How much longer till winter gets here?”

She’s taken to hounding her papa to go up to the attic and get down the “Mary-And-Joseph.” And I mean, hounds him. Last night while we were in the middle of the get-supper-on-the-table rush, she asked him five times in three minutes and then, when we all sat down to eat, she chirruped hopefully, “Did you get the Mary-And-Joseph?” Mr. Handsome hit the ceiling.

And so it goes. Christmas gets fussed and pushed into being, and holiness and goodwill abound in these drawn-upon, kicked in, and nicked-up walls. Ho-ho-ho.

I did put up a 5-foot strand of white Christmas lights atop the hutch. And I have been making cookies. That’s gotta count for something.

Cookie baking is a lot of work! Saying that makes me feel like I’m exiting my prime. ‘Cause back when I was in high school, I bounced around my mom’s kitchen turning out eighteen different kinds of sweetness and thinking nothing of it.

Nowadays, I do everything in stages. One day I mix up some dough, the next day I bake. After sending the cookies down cellar for a several-day-long siesta in the freezer, I finally muster enough energy to decorate. It’s a process. (Though that’s all theoretical optimism. I’m assuming I’ll eventually get all the cookies iced. As of this afternoon, the icing is in the fridge and the cookies in the freezer, but they haven’t been married together yet. And Guess Who has been constantly reminding me that cookies need to be decorated and she wants to do it NOW.)

Today, in stages (of course), I’m baking the cranberry-white chocolate cookies. I haven’t made the lemon drizzle for those yet, but it will happen. Later.

I have other kinds of cookies to make (and other kinds I’ve already made but haven’t told you about), but the unspeakable has happened: I’m nearly out of butter. Only five sticks of butter in the fridge and I lose my ability to function. It’s true!

Since I can’t bake (and since I can decorate but don’t want to), I’ll tell you about my new cookie love: these fig-date-anise pinwheels.

I don’t think I’ve ever made pinwheel cookies before, but these little buggers leaped up out of the pages of an ancient Gourmet magazine and onto my cookie trays before I even knew what was happening.

Well, not quite that fast. It all happened in stages, of course.

First I pondered the idea. Then I studied the recipe. Later I checked out my cupboards to make sure that the figs of yesteryear were still edible. (They were.) Eventually I got out my food processor to make the filling, but I ran out of dates (later I found a whole huge honkin’ bag in one of my two freezers) and had to sub in a couple prunes, and when I went to start in on the dough, my whole project came to a screeching halt because I had no anise seed in the house.

(Except I know I have anise seed. I bought it once upon a day. I bagged it up and stuck it— somewhere where I’d be sure to never find it again.)

And I was just starting to get into the swing of things, too. What a pity.

So the filling went in the fridge and I went shopping. But the two stores closest to my house didn’t sell anise seed. (What is wrong with them? Does nobody else use anise seed?) I returned home and called up a higher-end store (they had it!) and sent my husband out on a quest for the holy anise seed.

See, like I said, I bake in stages. You didn’t realize just how many stages were involved when I said that, did you?

The next day I mixed up the dough and set it in the fridge to chill. Several hours later (while visiting with a friend—the same one who was present for the making of the Christmas Nippies), I rolled out the dough, spread the filling, rolled it back up, and rolled the logs in sugar before wrapping them up tight in wax paper and sticking them back in the fridge.

The final final stage happened a day (or two?) later when I got around to slicing and baking the cookies. And falling in love.

Because these cookies are so worth all those hoops I had to jump through. All the waiting and phone calls and deep freezer searches—in hindsight, they were nothing.

These cookies are crunchy with thick sugar and fig seeds, pungent with anise, and tender with butter and cream cheese. Without being overly cloying or sweet (like so many goodies at this time of year), they are decadent and rich, musky and sophisticated, and totally grown-up.

If I was a really good writer and wanted to take the time to prove it, I would now go back and edit this whole piece, adding vignettes and analogies in order to draw a pithy correlation between the stages involved in growing older and making cookies. But that would mean that this blog post would have to be written in—oh help!—stages, and, well, if you give a woman a recipe, she’d rather eat it and then quick tell other people about it than sit around all day and write about it.

Though on second thought, that would maybe be more fun than decorating Christmas cookies with the kids….

Fig-and-Anise Pinwheels
Adapted from the December 2001 issue of Gourmet magazine

To grind the anise seed, use a coffee/spice grinder.

For the filling:
1 cup (8 ounces) packed dried figs, stemmed and roughly chopped
1 cup (7 ounces) packed pitted dates, roughly chopped
1/3 cup water
2 tablespoons white sugar

Puree the dried fruit with the water and sugar. Try to get the mixture fairly smooth, though a little chunkiness is fine. Chill the filling in the refrigerator for several hours (or days, as the case may be) until you are ready to shape the cookies.

For the dough:
½ cup (1 stick) butter
4 ounces cream cheese
½ cup white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg yolk
1 3/4 cups flour
2 teaspoons anise seeds, finely ground
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup Demerara sugar, for coating

Cream together the butter, cream cheese, and white sugar. Beat in the egg yolk and vanilla. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, ground anise, baking powder and soda, and the salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and beat until combined.

Divide the dough into two halves, roughly press each piece into a rectangle, wrap them in plastic, and set them in the refrigerator to chill for at least one hour.

To shape:
Remove one of the rectangles from the refrigerator, set it between two pieces of wax paper, and roll it out into a 7 x 9-inch rectangle, about 1/3-inch thick. Spread half of the fruit mixture over the piece of dough leaving a quarter inch border around the edges. Starting from the long side, roll the dough up, using the wax paper to get it going and then pulling the wax paper off as you go. Put the Demerara sugar into a sided pan and roll the log in the sugar, making sure that the whole thing gets well-covered with the crunchy sweetness. Wrap the log in wax paper and chill it in the fridge for at least four more hours.

Repeat with the remaining filling and rectangle of dough.

To bake:
Cut the logs into 1/3-inch-thick slices and set them on lightly buttered cookie sheets. Bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 12-16 minutes, or until lightly browned. Allow them to rest on the hot cookie sheets for a couple extra minutes to set up before transferring them to cooling racks.

Bag and freeze.

This same time, years previous: ginger-cream scones and gingerbread men