I will steal Christmas cookies if I have to

I didn't bake my usual double batch of moistly scrumptious peanut butter blossom Christmas cookies this year. Ran out of flour, that's my official excuse, but I think deep down it has more to do with a waning interest in things as they have always been. I mean, I like tradition, just not year after year after year.

Yeah, I know, I heard it.

Baking cookies has always been one of my few customary Christmas tasks, not so much because it's an old family practice passed down through the ages, but because it's an excuse to lump white sugar, brown sugar, peanut butter, vanilla, eggs and a few other nastily non-nutritious things together and stick a Hershey's Kiss on top. Sure, they're not as good as green-dyed spritz cookies shaped like wreaths or powdered sugar frosted Santa cuts-out, but as for calories per pound, I think my blossoms rank right up there. Oh, don't worry about that. I'll be starting my New Year's diet any month now. No wait, 2021 is an oddnumbered year. I really did intend to continue my holiday habit this year, and got as far as setting out the mixing bowl and the measuring cups on Christmas Day. As I was assembling the various ingredients, I reached into the cupboard and grabbed the 1-pound flour bag, which weighed about 3 ounces. Hmm. Seems I made a mental note a month ago when baking my traditional deer hunting season chocolate chip cookies that I ought to get more white enriched, but it also seems as if that mental reminder stayed with me about as long as the one about restocking on toilet paper. Been relying on shoppers and grocery bags for weeks now. It's why I always go with paper.

I could've scooted up to the local openeven- on-Christmas convenience store, but I deemed it not all that crucial that I spoon out dough this very day. I can always do it tomorrow, I figured, which tells me right there that these cookies are no longer a must-do for Christmas. Since Santa stopped coming (somewhere around 1969), it's kinda been more like 'Yeah, I want 'em, but it'd be a heckuva lot easier to just steal some from my niece at the big family gathering.' It's OK. She likes it. Makes her feel appreciated. Or victimized. Fine line there.

Truth is, I make the cookies for my son, but since he's 23 now and more interested in building his biceps than swallowing sweets, there's not a lot of practicality in a batch of blossoms. Yeah, I know, it's still fun to poke the kisses into the 375-degree dough and a snarf a few while the milk chocolate's melted, but then I have like two ice cream buckets full of 'em and not much to do except, well, stuff my face until I sadly sob with the realization that another year has come and gone and I am farther down's life's twisty playground slide and closing in on the mud hole at the bottom. Aren't the holidays joyous?

Speaking of my childhood (we weren't but somebody had to change the subject), I don't recall many long-standing family traditions. Sure, we always had a tree with a blonde angel on top that looked just like the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz, and my parents did the Santa Claus ruse until they realized it really wasn't doing all that much good to send us to church to learn the Ten Commandments and then baldly lie to us, but as for any special Lesar family thing, we just didn't have any. I do remember one year a few days after Christmas me and my mom and sister were sitting in the kitchen eating lunch when the tree spontaneously tipped over and crashed and I sort of hoped that might catch on, but, nope, just a one-off.

That's the thing about a tradition, you can't just decide you need to have one. These things need to spawn themselves naturally, without any 'We're gonna do this every year whether anybody likes it or not' intent. The real traditions are born of time and spirit, slowly nurtured, and developed over generations, until one day somebody finally says, 'For cryin' out loud, we gotta do that again? Can't we just open the presents and turn on the football game?'

Some quasi-traditions, too, will start strong, glow brightly for a short time, then fade out like the Star of Bethlehem when the dust storm rolled through (a seldom-referenced weather phenomenon in 0 B.C.) Practices such as waiting until Christmas morning to open gifts to perpetuate the Santa myth are all fine and dandy, but when the youngest 'kid' in the family is now 37, it kinda loses its charm. Same thing for the annual holiday family photo. When the young-uns are growing, it's fun to see them change; nowadays it looks more like somebody stopped at the nursing home and took a group shot on bingo night. I might still make my cookies, if for no other reason than I bought a $9 bag of kisses and the alternative to sticking them in hot dough is to binge eat 'em all plain while watching Jeopardy marathons (we miss you already, Alex). That way I can say I carried on the cookie tradition, even if it's not so much a handing down of stories, beliefs, customs, etc. from generation to generation (as the dictionary I just plagiarized says it is), but a not-so-serious repetition of something I started a few years back that I continue to do even though my doctor says my A1C would be about 20 percent lower if I didn't. He's just miffed 'cuz I don't share with him.

Besides, my cookies are about all I've got. I don't decorate my house anymore, I don't send any cards, I don't make a special meal (unless a microwave beef pot pie qualifies) and the Ghost of Christmas Past doesn't even stop by anymore to tell me that next to me, Scrooge was a philanthropist.

So, when you drive by my place in the next few days, roll down your window, and you're likely to smell the traditional aroma of homebaked goodness. Well, yeah, I may be nuking one that I stole from my niece, but it's the thought (and the empty calories) that counts.

THE

BORN

LESAR