The Scents of Christmas

For me getting ready for Christmas is not so much about decorating the house or planning what gifts to buy or even caroling or attending an Advent service. Instead, what evokes Christmas for me n a visceral way are the smells of Christmas: the sharp scent of pine needles and the spicy mixture of ginger, cinnamon, cloves I associate with Christmas baking.

As a child the Christmas season always began when my mother got out the huge crocks she used to make enormous batches of German cookies: lebkuchen, springerle, and pfeffernusse. The day she bought her heavy duty Kitchen-Aid mixer was a cause for celebration: no more taking turns turning the heavy, sticky batter for what seemed like hours with a wooden spoon.

I still have that mixer more than thirty years later, and every time I turn it on, I think about my mom, and I have to smile, remembering that she was always a little careless around machinery. I used to curse under my breath cleaning up after she dumped too much flour in the batter and turned the powerful machine on too high a setting-- sending flour and batter in a spray that coated the counters, the floor and even the walls. I remember finding the overlooked stray drop still stuck somewhere as late as January.

With the baking came the stories of how German relatives, especially my father's mother, had made dozens of cookies in crocks the size of garbage cans and then buried them to keep out larcenous little fingers from making off with them ahead of time.

Traditional German cookies are truly a labor of love because the recipes are complicated and date back centuries to days before refrigeration. Almost none of them use butter, and the eggs and sugar are not simply creamed but rather whipped up to a pale froth – 15 minutes on a high speed mixer or an hour by hand. Then the dough needs to be chilled, rolled out, and the cookies themselves shaped from wooden molds or carved wood rolling pins, to be laid out on baking sheets, dried overnight, baked at relatively low heat for almost twenty minutes, and then aged for a couple of weeks in air-tight containers to let the flavors emerge.

For my paternal grandmother, with her five boys and one girl, it was a definite challenge to make sure the goodies lasted until Christmas. My mother had only four kids to keep track of, but it was my father who was mostly likely to sneak a cookie ahead of schedule.

I remember how good the kitchen smelled with the windows all steamed up and the cold Michigan winter kept at bay outside while my siblings and I helped or simply watched and then argued over who got to lick the bowl. Strangely enough I didn't even like eating some of the cookies until I was in my teens and had developed a taste for the unusual flavors like anise and the hard texture which make them perfect “dunking” cookies in a steaming cup of coffee. The pleasure was in the preparation and the shared company.

Even now I warn friends who haven't tried them that these cookies can be an “acquired” taste. Unfortunately, it's a taste my husband and three boys acquired early on, and they wait anxiously during the first few days of December until I assure them that yes I am baking again this year despite my occasional threats to stop because it's just so much work.

As the years have gone by, I've done a little research into the origins of these cookies and discovered to my surprise that their flavorings – the anise, the almonds, the cloves, the white pepper, and even the cardamom – were ingredients that were added not so much for taste – but rather to show off the wealth of the families who could afford to bake with such exotic ingredients. Some of the cookies made from elaborate molds were painted and put on display; they were not even meant to be eaten!

For me making and baking these cookies is also a kind of display, but it's a display of sociability, of my cultural heritage, and a source of pride that even I, who have few, if any, manual talents, can still produce a damn good cookie.

It's also a ritual that connects me to my siblings as I call up to ask about a variation in recipe or commiserate if the springerle didn't rise so well as last year. If I had just one Christmas wish, it would be the hope that some day all of us could gather again one December afternoon and bake our springerle, our lebkuchen and our pffernusse together. For nothing evokes the happiest memories of my childhood Christmases like the warm spicy scent of cookies baking in the oven.