Food Friday: Season’s Greetings!

The holidays are upon us, and I don’t feel as if we are quite ready, or even in the mood yet. There are cookies to bake! Boxes to mail! Candy canes and gum drops to buy. Christmas cards to address. Ho, ho, ho. How can I feel glum when I spent 22 minutes in line at the post office, to mail a card to a sweet friend in the UK? Joy to the world.

We have been going through all the ritual motions for Christmas. We got the Tupperware boxes of ornaments, lights, stockings, baubles, and treasured gewgaws down from the attic over the weekend, much to Luke the wonder dog’s consternation. Life isn’t so exciting for him now, after Thanksgiving. He doesn’t have a 4-year-old sidekick stealthily palming him dog biscuits all day long. He follows Mr. Sanders around the house as closely as he can, and yet he wasn’t prepared for the ladder that suddenly descended in the hall, or for the dusty boxes stacked on his favorite sunning spots on the living room rug. Luke sat sentinel on the front porch, watching as we strung ropes of lights in the Japanese maple tree in the front yard, and draped swags of red-ribboned greenery from the front porch lights. The Christmas tree in the living room doesn’t smell quite right to Luke. There is no eau de chat that he can detect; no squirrel, no deer, no opossum. And the tree is blocking Luke’s view of the street: he can’t see when the life-threatening UPS truck comes to call. He is a little put out by these changes.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t getting underfoot at every possible turn. In our little house Luke has several carefully chosen observation points which maximize his enjoyment of our daily activities: he likes lying under the kitchen table, where he can keep one eye on the cook, and another on the squirrels raiding the bird feeder. Luke inches closer to the action when actual cooking is taking place, because he understands gravity, and the tendency of cheese and other delicious bits of food to fall unbidden to the kitchen floor. He selflessly rushes to hoover up all dropped food without being asked. Though he does not care for lettuce, or raw gingersnap dough, as we have discovered this week.

We left Luke home for a few hours last weekend, with a Kong-ful of peanut butter, so we could do a little local shopping downtown and visit the library. Our library has just re-opened after being closed for almost a year, to repair foundation damage sustained during the hurricane a few years ago. We ventured downtown to wander through the familiar stacks now standing firmly on spanking new floors. And it was delightful. The smell of new paint was heady. The books were still orderly. I had a good wallow in the cook books and through the new acquisitions. One book that I snatched up was The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America by Sara B. Franklin. Judith Jones edited novels and poems by John Cheever, cookbooks by Julia Child and most famously, Anne Frank’s diary. I hadn’t heard of her until I watched the delightful series about Julia Child, about her time in Boston, at WGBH. Julia And now I am looking forward to spending some quality time with Judith Jones.

I found some new cookbooks to bring home, to get some ideas, and to just soak up the sunshine of other cooks. It is quieter after Thanksgiving, after all. There aren’t any sweet little boys offering up dog treats. I will avoid the post office as much as I can, and I’ll find more time to visit the library. And I’ll be sure that a nice hunk of cheese will drop in Luke’s periphery, so he starts to get in the mood for the holidays, too.

Go wander through your library and revisit some old friends, make some new ones, too. Smell the paper and the glue, chat with the reference librarian, smile at the kiddos. Imagine all the stories in that building, just minutes from home.

These are the other books we brought home: Milk Street by Christopher Kimball, Simply Genius by our friends at Food52, and The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen.

“At Christmas play and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year.”
― Thomas Tusser

Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.