Acerca de

      In the bright snowy days of December, my mother would spend hours in our large farmhouse kitchen, baking and making candies, filling our home with the scents of vanilla and cinnamon and butter and yeast, the familiar fragrances of Christmas.  And at the end of those day, she would have blanketed the kitchen counters with divinity, peanut brittle, penuche, cashew crèmes, walnut Christmas cookies,  frosted sugar cookies, glass candies, and yeast breads that she had shaped into braids and wreaths and slathered with white frosting, sprinkling the icing with chopped nuts and bits of red and green candied cherries. She would package the goodies in cardboard Montgomery Wards shirt boxes, wrap the boxes in red tissue paper and curly green and gold ribbons, and drive around the countryside, distributing the boxes to family and neighbors, leaving one in the mailbox for the rural carrier and keeping several on hand to give to visitors like the Watkins man and the truck driver who delivered gas from the Farmers Union Coop.

        These were gratifying days for my mother, who recalled with pride the Christmas she baked 500 cookies and three dozen yeast breads. “People don’t believe me when I tell them that,” she would say, “but it’s the truth.” I would tell her that I could attest to the accuracy of her numbers.