These need some explanation. My father is a big - and I mean, huge - fan of gingerbread cookies. His fondness for ginger-flavored sweets once led my mother to produce a pie that had more ginger than pumpkin to it, but that's another story for another day. I grew up eating molasses-and-ginger cookies the size of my hand that my mom called "Joe Froggers." (They were actually precisely the size of the opening to a jar of peanut butter, because my mom used a peanut butter jar lid to cut the cookies. This was back when peanut butter jars had metal lids.) And, of course, Christmas was not Christmas without at least one batch of moon cookies. Moon cookies are gingerbread cookies - a specially crafted recipe, adapted from the Joe Frogger recipe and one for Scandinavian gingerbread. (Yes, Virginia, there was a time when my mother cooked.) There's enough ginger in the recipe to make these cookies almost spicy-hot, which makes them just perfect for dunking in milk.
We called them "moon cookies" because they were formed in molds, and when my brother and I were small, my mother had only one set of molds: A celestial set, including Saturn (or some other ringed planet), the sun, a full moon, and a crescent moon. Each mold is slightly larger than the palm of my hand. Although only half the cookies had moons on them, they were dubbed the "moon cookies" and the name stuck, even after my mother collected a dozen other molds. My personal favorites are a set of smaller molds which form cookies about an inch and a half in diameter (because with the smaller mold it's easier to get the cookies thin and crisp, and the smaller cookies are easier to fit in one's dunking glass) - but I still call them moon cookies.
They're a holiday tradition for our family. One batch makes several dozen cookies (depending on which molds see the most use that year) and we frequently give them away as gifts or take them to our offices. Several of my parents' office friends start bothering my parents about them immediately after Thanksgiving: "When are you going to make the moon cookies?"
So Matt and I went yesterday to my parents' house, and Matt helped stir in the flour, and the four of us sat around the dining table, pressing dough into molds and carefully laying the cookies on sheets, popping up every ten minutes to swap out a cookie sheet. It's tedious work, the more so because the dough is sticky and unforgiving, and because most of us prefer thin, crisp cookies, which makes for thin, easily-torn dough. But the smell of ginger and cinnamon and a half-dozen other spices was in the air, and we were a family, together.
After we made the cookies, we watched a couple of Christmas videos I'd gotten Matt for his birthday. The first one was a little lame - too much for very young children, I think - but the second was sweet and nice, with simply beautiful singing.
Some other chores were taken care of as well - Dad and Matt oiled the hinges on my car's doors, which were squeaking badly. And Dad hunted the old tree out of the attic for Matt and I to borrow. Its branches are somewhat bare, but with enough lights and ornaments, it won't be too noticeable, I hope. (Yes, I know - you'd think a Christmas freak like me would insist on a real tree, but I grew up with an artificial tree, so the real ones don't have any especial sentimental value attached. I never promised to be consistent, or make sense.)
After all that, Matt and I left, heading for Portsmouth, where Greg was taking us to see the George Carlin concert as our Christmas-Hanukkah-Midwinter present. We left in plenty of time, because for one thing, neither Matt nor I had eaten more than a broken cookie all day and so needed to stop for dinner, and second, because this was going to be my first attempt at driving to Greg's without written directions, and I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to miss a turn or exit and have to turn around.
But we wolfed down our McDonald's dinner, and I remembered all the exits and turns from previous visits, and despite going slowly down a few roads to admire the decorations, we arrived a little early at Greg's parents' house, chatted a bit with him and his father and watched a bit of the football television that was on the TV. Then we were off to Willet Hall.
The concert (performance? show?) was great. The opening act was pretty good - great jokes, but needed a little work on his timing and to know when he'd leaned on a punchline far enough. Carlin was wonderful, as he is, though I think the very best part of his show was when he insulted a couple of extremely drunk hecklers until they left. We all cheered.
I had intended today to run a stack of errands - take some checks to the bank to be deposited, take a doormat I bought that turned out to be damaged back for exchange, do some shopping in the colonial district for some gifts. But my car has been acting a little weird, and the brakes were squealing a bit, so I took it in to the shop this morning, which is why I'm posting my entry so late.
After sitting in the shop for two and a half hours (good thing I brought a book with me) they gave me the list, and the long and short of it was that my front brakes needed new pads, and the back ones needed replacing entirely, and the one wheel that was thumping was thumping because it was loose on the axle. I can have my car back this evening and the whole job is going to cost between $650 and $700. Ouch. But it's got to be done, so it's got to be done.
So today I'm sitting at home, and I suppose after I post this entry and have some lunch, I'll put up the Christmas tree, and my errands will have to wait until later this week.
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