Grandma’s Hearth

Long before department stores put their Christmas decorations up before the last fireworks faded on the 4th of July, I remember a season that was shorter and much, much sweeter. For me, the holiday began with one magical day filled with joy, with wonderful smells, and the most delicious cookies I ever tasted, those that I made at my grandma’s house. Sure, she helped me a little, but she always told everyone that I made them all.

Grandma’s older now, and I take her cookies. But I remember her as very young and completely in command of her kitchen. I remember that Grampa bought her a fancy new electric stove, and Grandma cooked her everyday meals on it. But when it came time to make bread or bake Christmas cookies, she had Grampa bring in some firewood and she started the old beehive oven next to the fireplace. She started early in the morning to make sure the bricks inside got nice and hot. Soon its heat filled the kitchen, fogged the windows, and left the tang of woodsmoke in the air. I knew even before I opened the door to Grandma’s house when it was the day we were going to make cookies.

Grandma had two cats, Butterbean and Imperial Grand Duke Bartholomew—at least that’s what Grandma called him when he stuck up his nose at the dinner she paid much too much for. Most of the time it was just Beanie and Bart. On cookie day, they would station themselves next to the old beehive oven, never moving for fear they might let a stray bit of heat get past them except to stand up, stretch, and turn the other side to be toasted. Beanie and Bart aren’t around any more, but I see them still when I visit Grandma’s house. They lounge in front of her oven, in the rug Grandma made to remember them by.

I remember the old yellow mixing bowls, the fine dust of flour everywhere, the fresh eggs from the coop in the backyard, and the cool milk from the icebox. Keeping cows had become too much for Grampa, but Grandma wouldn’t let him throw away the old churn, and she insisted on always having the freshest milk. Sometimes she would get up early in the morning to make sure the milkman didn’t give her any bottles left over from the day before.

Grandma let me mix everything together to make the dough. As I got older, she even let me break the eggs. The first time, it didn’t go so well, and the shells ended up in the dough and the rest was, well, more places than I can remember. Grandma laughed so hard that Grampa came running in to make sure everything was all right, and soon he was laughing, too. Grandma cleaned up most of it, and Beanie and Bart got what she missed.

Soon the dough looked dry and Grandma dusted flour on the table and selected one of her rolling pins to squeeze it flat. She claimed which pin she used and how hard she rolled changed the flavor of the cookies. She let me try rolling—it looked like fun but was hard work—and she said my rolling made the cookies taste best, even better than hers.

But the rolling wasn’t the best part. No, the best part was turning the flat dough into a menagerie of wild animals using Grandma’s cookie cutters. I don’t know how many she had in that old wooden box. Some were the ordinary kind—stars and bells and Christmas trees and angels—that she used for the cookies she took to the church bake sale. But Grandma had a secret stash of lions and bears and giraffes and even a moose.

We used them all for Christmas cookies, but sometimes there were problems. Sometimes the wild beasts got into fights. Sometimes an unfortunate animal would loose a leg (or worse), usually when Grandma wasn’t looking and I was a little hungry.

When I was little, Grandma cut all the cookies herself because the cookie cutters were sharp and she didn’t want me to hurt myself. One year she told me I was old enough to cut out my own special cookie, and I told her I wanted a lion. She searched through the box and pulled out the lion and I made a little roar. Grandma giggled and Beanie and Bart looked up at me like I was some kind of strange beast. Then I said my lion was going to eat all the other animals, and Grandma said the she hoped he wouldn’t. She hoped the lion would leave a few of the other animal cookies so there’d be some for me. I thought that was a good idea. So when we put the animals on the cookie sheets, we put the lion on a sheet all to himself.

Then Grandma slid the sheets into the old beehive oven one by one. Grandma didn’t use a timer, and of course the old oven didn’t have a thermostat. But telling when the cookies were done was easy because you could see right inside the oven and if you weren’t looking, you could always smell the warm caramel aroma that said it was time to tend to the cookies. They always came out of the old oven perfect, just a little bit brown at the edges.

Then Grandma would mix some powdered sugar, a bit of butter, some vanilla extract and some water to frost the cookies. But I wanted something more. I knew where Grandma kept her food coloring and I knew all the rainbows it could make—Grandma sometimes put a dab of green or blue into things I usually wouldn’t eat, like scrambled eggs. I wanted to make my lion cookie red. Red, to me, tasted of cinnamon and Christmas, even if it was just sugar and water.

Grandma said no. Gingerbread and Christmas cookies, she said, should always be frosted white. “But Grandma,” I complained, loudly enough that Grampa again came huffing back into the kitchen.

He asked what was the matter, and I told him. He looked at Grandma, who stared back at him sternly. It was her kitchen, after all. And he looked back to me.

“Gingerbread has always been frosted white in our kitchen, and I don’t see any reason to change,” he said. “But lions are another matter. If a lion wants to be red, far be it from me to argue. Lions are the kings of beasts.”

“And the kings of cookies,” I said.

Grandma laughed again, and she mixed the red into the frosting and frosted my lion red. It tasted of cinnamon and Christmas.