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

Vignette One: a finger
A few minutes ago the Baby Nickel announced that the just-turned off-stove burner was still hot, and, while I watched, struck dumb with horror, he cheerfully walked over to it, pressed his index finger to the coil and held it there. Cold water, ice, and a bandage later, he’s still crying. Good grief!

Vignette Two: my eyes
My eyes hurt all the time. The combination of age, genetics, and this computer screen is too much for these little squinchers of mine. I need to schedule an appointment with an eye doctor ASAP.

Perhaps this development is connected to my migraines?

Vignette Three: the whole body
Mr. Handsome is sick. “Sick” for him is different than “sick” for me. When he is sick, he shivers uncontrollably from chills, stays home from church, and then watches a movie while folding laundry and cleaning up the joint. When I’m sick—and just a cold is enough to flatten me—I recline on my bed of pain and do not move.

Vignette Four: boobs
The other day I made some cookies.

After pulling them from the oven, I dubbed them “Christmas Nippies.” Can you see why?

They are along the same lines as peanut blossoms—a rolled ball of dough that, once baked, gets anointed with a kiss—though in this case it’s a minty butter dough that gets a candy cane kiss. These cookies ended up being nothing special (they taste rather artificial—probably from the candy cane kisses—so I don’t even really like them [though I love the candy kisses all by their lonesomes]), but the kids enjoy them and they do look festive.

Anyway, once plunked in the middle of the hot cookie, the candy cane kisses got quite soft and creamy, so I, in hopes of turning them from kisses into coins, jiggled them from side to side. They flattened out into coins…with little nipples.

“Boob cookies,” I said to my friend who was visiting. “Just like boob lights.”

(You’re familiar with boob lights, right? They’re the ceiling lights that look like, well, boobs.)

“You know what Darwin does?” my friend asked, referring to a friend, a giant of a man, super-tall and super-funny. “He likes to walk into a room, lift his arm up, and just stand there caressing those lights.”

Just the thought of Darwin stroking a boob light, a studied expression on his bearded face, got me hooting so hard that I sprouted tears and had to lean on the counter for support.

(Darwin has a way of bringing out the hilarity in life. At Wayne’s funeral, he put a can of Diet Coke, Wayne’s drink of choice, in his pocket so he could hold it for moral support while singing a solo, but then, while chasing down one of his kids prior to the service, he crashed into a railing, busted open the can, soaking his entire pant leg and filling his shoe with syrupy sweetness. We were all sitting in the basement hallway when he walked in with a stricken look on his face. His wife leaped to her feet in alarm, but then he produced the can, and as comprehension slowly dawned, our somberly dressed crowd dissolved into uproarious guffaws. Before his solo, Darwin showed the congregation the mangled can, told the story of how it came to be, and then sang beautifully. He did Wayne proud, Darwin did, pop-drenched pants and all.)

“I can’t stand the word ‘nippy,’” my friend went on. “People say the weather is ‘nippy’ and I hate it! I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

“Really?” I asked, puzzled. “Why not?”

“Well, because nippy comes from nip-ons! You know, boobs, cold weather, nippy….”

“Oh.” I said. “That never even occurred to me. Wow. Nippy…. huh.”

Forgive me if this conversation has destroyed your ability to freely enjoy weather adjectives, cookies with kisses, and ceiling lamps, but I needed to get it off my chest. (Oops.)

And just so you know, I come by my ability to draw correlations between inanimate objects and body parts quite honestly… from my mother.

Who refers to whole, canned plums as, um, testicles.

This same time, years previous: cashew brittle

On Monday evening my mom came to spend the night and then stay with the three younger kids while I took Yo-Yo to his routine doctor’s appointment in the big city the next day.

I could sure get used to having a live-in nanny. Skipping off to a doctor’s appointment is practically effortless when I can leave the house with everyone still in their jammies. When I got back, Sweetsie’s room was all fixed up (my mother likes to pretend she’s Ram Dass in A Little Princess, trucking in little pretties to fluff up the kids’ [and grownups’] nests—and you know what? If she had a monkey on her shoulder, there wouldn’t be any way to tell the two of them apart), chores done, books read, and kids in jolly-fine spirits.

Maybe we need to quick turn Amish and build a Daudy house.

And then she up and took the two olders home with her so now, with a 50 percent reduction in my work load, I’m feeling right footloose and fancy-free.

This morning I played a couple card games with the kids and then shooed them off to play. Cookies were on my agenda (again) and I didn’t want any grabby fingers meddling.

“Can we have a tea party?” Sweetsie asked. “With gingerbread and water and little glasses?”

“No,” I said, eager to get to my work. But then I conceded just a little, “I’ll think about it. Now run along.”

By the time I greased my cookie sheets and started rolling the peanut butter dough into balls, the two littles were immersed in a game of make believe. They had back packs and books, play food was stuffed in an unplugged toaster oven, and they were vigorously bossing each other around.

Normally when the kids play like so, I don’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. There is no way I want to draw attention away from their game and towards myself. But today, with the bigs being gone and a lazy day stretched out in front of me, I got an uncommon urge, an urge to charm the socks off my kids.

So. While they were all a-bustle over by the dress-up box, I slipped the cookie dough back into the fridge, put some water on to boil, fetched three little mugs from the hutch, spread a red-checked cloth on the kitchen floor, and set the “table” with napkins, spoons, and the bowl of sugar that originally was intended for the dough balls.

The red raspberry tea set to steeping, I approached their school/house/store and rapped on the wall. Without even turning to look at me, Sweetsie called out, Come in!

“I was wondering if you guys would like to come to my house for tea?”

“Well, sure,” they said agreeably.

“You could come over right now or in a little bit,” I said, not wanting to be bossy.

“Um, okay,” Sweetsie said. “In a little bit.”

And so I returned to my kitchen to sit on the floor and await for my guests.

In short order they arrived. Backpacks were shed, cookies devoured, tea stirred and sipped, and when a guest’s full glass went tippy-oh, I, feeling very Mary Poppinesque, didn’t even bother to clean it up. Instead, I laughed and benevolently offered a refill.

The pot of tea emptied, my guests offered many thanks before carrying there sugar-bottomed cups to the sink and heading back to school/home/the store. And I, my urge to charm appeased, tossed the cloth in the wash, pulled the bowl of dough back out of the fridge, and commenced to bake up a storm.

A couple hours later at lunch: the Baby Nickel was fully engrossed in spreading his grape jelly all the way to the edges of his toast when out of the blue he heartily declared, “Thanks for having that tea party, Mom. It was fun!”

And just like that, the socks were charmed right off me.

Peanut Butter Cookies
Adapted from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett

There are lots of peanut butter cookie recipes out there but I have yet to find a better one. These are classic. Crunchy around the edges, chewy in the middle, and perfectly peanut-buttery.

3/4 cup (1 ½ sticks) butter
3/4 cup white sugar, plus extra for rolling
1 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons flavorless oil (I used canola) or peanut oil
2 eggs
2 ½ teaspoons vanilla
1 1/4 cups peanut butter (creamy or chunky)
2 1/4 cups flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt, scant

Cream together the butter, oil, and sugars. Beat in the eggs and vanilla and then the peanut butter. Add the dry ingredients and mix until combined. Chill the dough for a couple hours. (It will keep for several days in the fridge, and it freezes well, too.)

Shape the dough into balls (about 1-inch in diameter). Lightly grease your baking sheets.

For classic crissscross cookies:
Set the balls on the cookie sheets and, using a fork, press down one way and then the other to make a checkerboard pattern. To keep the dough from sticking to the fork, dip it into some granulated sugar between presses.

Bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes or until they are slightly golden brown at the edges but still soft in the middle. Take care not to overbake.

For peanut butter blossoms:
Roll the balls of dough in a bowl of granulated sugar. Set the balls on the cookie sheets and bake at 350 degrees for 8-12 minutes, or until the tops are beginning to crack. Remove the cookies from the oven and press a Hershey’s kiss into the top of each cookie. After allowing the cookies to set up for a couple minutes, transfer them to a cooling rack. Wait to bag up the cookies till they are totally cool and the chocolate has set.

My own version:
Confession: I don’t like Hershey’s kisses in my peanut butter cookies. It’s too much chocolate per mouthful, plus the kisses often end up falling off somewhere between the freezer and the cookie platter. Therefore, I’ve come up with my own little version: Wilber dark chocolate disks. Instead of pressing a kiss into each baked cookie, I press in one of those little disks. Then, just for pretty, while the chocolate is all soft and creamy-dreamy, I drop one Ghirardelli white chocolate chip on top.

Note: if you want less crinkly cookie edges, smash the sugar-rolled balls down a little using the smooth bottom of a drinking glass. I did it both ways this morning and while I think I like the crinkly look best, you just may prefer the other.

This same time, years previous: Ree’s Monkey Bread and Butter Cookies