New Traditions

Growing up, every year a week before Christmas, I would spend a whole weekend with my Grandma baking. As you become an adult, you make your own family traditions. Sometimes how they come about is the surprising thing. My Grandma and I would go shopping on Friday night for all the ingredients for cookies, brownies, cakes all of the family’s favorite desserts. I would spend all day Saturday and Sunday baking everything under the sun, including old family traditions and new stuff that my aunt loved or my uncle found that he just had to have. Once my father became a diabetic we also started experimenting with how to make some of the treats with less sugar, no sugar or Splenda. I remember every year and all the memories that we made. I moved to Vancouver Washington for five years, but I always made sure that I was at her house the weekend before Christmas. We would spend that time laughing and baking like I was never gone. My Grandma passed away this last December. I decided I would make cookies a few short weeks after without her.


“What am I thinking?” I thought to myself. “I can’t bake Christmas cookies without her.”

I decided that I would start the same way we always did. I took Grandma’s cookie recipes and made a shopping list. As with most women of my grandma’s age, they change recipes or figure that adding this later in the recipe or, adding a pinch more of that changes the cookie, but makes it better or her own.

“Oh yeah,” she would say, “I found two pinches of powdered sugar does the trick.”

It was never written on any of her recipes, as she copied them for me they looked like my second draft of a Major Writing Assignment, lines here and there words scribbled over this and that. As the years had proven, I thought I was ready to take on her massive notes.

As I was making cookies and feeling so alone, I realized that her pineapple turnovers were not coming out correctly. The jelly mix that is inserted into the bread dough is supposed to be very gooey and almost dry. I had something very wet and runny. I threw out the batch and started over, going by detail to detail. I could feel my heart breaking in my chest and my eyes welling up with tears, I couldn’t pass this on to Josette or the rest of our family and was going to lose a piece of grandma in the process.

Just then Jimmy, my brother-in-law walked into my house, as he came around the corner I heard him call, “Do you need someone to sample cookies?” I started to cry.

Jimmy married my sister had married my sister a year before this. He is almost ten years younger than my sister and has had a hard time becoming part of our family. He does not have a relationship with his family, he tends to ignore or walk away from family discussions because he has never had them. He is also a construction worker, not the man you would expect to grab a recipe and go to town with it. But he did just that. Jimmy took the recipe and redid the batch of cookies following the directions exactly as they were written. After he realized that we were adding too many eggs and pointed it out I realized my Grandma had put it in the wrong spot on the recipe list. He became my hero in a moment. We were able to fix and save the recipe. As the second batch came out of the oven I realized I was laughing like old times. Jimmy is most certainly not my Grandma, and I may have lost a family member, but I have gained a new one and with that, a new family tradition, together.