Holiday Baking

Finally, I have the time, clarity and impetus to get a post together. It's amazing how quickly the year has scooted by since last posting before Thanksgiving.

Every year, I say that same thing because once Halloween goes by it seems like the final 61 days are a blur of decorating, shopping and trying to train myself not to nibble at the Adorable Wife's "holiday baking." Quotes here are used to identify the exact words she uses, but they may convey the wrong concept. "Holiday baking'' might cause one to think of Betty Crocker hard at it ten days before Christmas, slaving over the oven to hand-craft gifts of homemade treats for friends and family. Dressed in a A-line and pearls with immaculate hair, nails and makeup, Betty
thoughtfully loads cookies, tarts, cakes and candy into baskets or tins and garnishes them with bows which she herself ties. The full force of "holiday baking" might even give one to assume Betty hosts a Christmas party in her beautifully decorated home at which the prized treats are distributed to anxiously expectant neighbors, local power families and her kids' teachers.

But that isn't what happens here.

Adorable Wife starts worrying in late August about what to do. She bakes cookies, candied orange peels and fudge for all of her heftiest donors and a few things for a couple of girlfriends, but not for others in general. She really should forget the girlfriends because they're always dieting anyway or are allergic to sugar. Regardless, just after Halloween Adorable Wife lays in a load of pecans, condensed milk and chocolate chips just so she will know they are there when she's ready to crank up the oven in six short weeks.

And finally in December, she cuts the bear loose. Demands are made of her employer for time off, since most everything is given away to work-related friends of the institution. I am summoned from my winter hibernation to assist. Then for three days there is a fury of white flour dust in the air and gritty, dried brown sugar residue on the counter tops. The kitchen is a whirlwind of cookie sheets, bowls of all sizes awaiting washing, orange peels cooling on racks and displeased comments regarding the unsatisfactory grade of butter I allegedly bought. The oven, roused from its eleven-month rest, runs constantly.

My job is usually to wash bowls as they are emptied, cookies sheets when they are almost cool enough to touch, spoons and measuring vessels of all kinds as well--and have them instantly available when Her Adorableness demands them. This is the first year in many that I have been present for the entire ordeal, so I had a front-row seat for the whole thing.

Wife prefers not to work in a dress, heels and pearls, but in a warm-up suit and sneakers. Things being what they are for her, the warm-up jacket often gives way to a T-shirt and I am commanded to open a window. Also, after all of this ''holiday baking'' is done and over, there is no party. There is no gaiety or salivating neighbor waiting at the door. Adorable Wife merely shovels everything into little boxes and runs deliveries each day for a week until all is gone. By Christmas Eve, I once again have the grit off the countertops and all the bowls back in the cabinets.

There is no more baking for the next twelve months. It was once true that Adorable Wife would make a cake in September for my birthday, but since the time all the icing slid off the top layer that seems to have gone by the wayside. I guess my birthday cake really doesn't qualify as holiday baking anyway but it was a nice gesture.

So now Thanksgiving is done, the baking is done, Christmas is done, and after tomorrow, New Year's Day is done as well. That finishes off ''the holidays" as we have come to call the time, loosely from Thanksgiving to the New Year's. The long, dark tunnel of winter is before us with little to look forward to until (for me) March Madness begins. Even with that, I can't say I will miss much about 2010. Except for the November election, I must admit 2010 was pretty bleak for me. Like the New York Mets used to say, ''maybe next year.''