As I watch the cookie tins accumulate on our kitchen counter I find myself wondering just what it is about the Christmas season that triggers a desire... no, a need..... to bake cookies.
Memorial Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July.... when these holidays approach no one races to the grocery store for bags and pounds of flour, sugar, chocolate morsels and colored sprinkles. No one spends hours on end in the kitchen slipping baking sheets in and out of the oven. And no one feels slighted if there's no oven-browned morsels for desert. No one shows up at a barbecue and says What - no cookies?
So why the need to generate and devour cookies by the peck and bushel at Christmas?
It suppose it means that we haven't moved as far from animal behavior as we like to think we have. As darkness lingers for better than half of each 24 hour day, as crops disappear from the fields, as fresh water turns to ice, our animal instincts kick in. Like squirrels stuffing their cheeks full of nuts, we humans stuff our bellies to the misshapen bursting point.
Yet there are far healthier foods we could cram into our mouths - foods that would leave us still feeling satisfyingly full hours later. Which brings me back to.... what is it about cookies at Christmas?
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