My Patient Husband learned to make gingerbread cookies this Christmas. They’re really good. He looked at a bunch of recipes, got a feel for how it would work, then modified the recipe so we didn’t end up with your typical gingerbread cookie (ie, stiff enough that if you stick them in coffee for five minutes, they absorb all the coffee and are still so hard they send chips of teeth flying across the kitchen.) These are soft and yummy. He did good.
Am I posting to brag? Not as such. See, we didn’t have a gingerbread man cutout, so he and the Kiddos used our sugar cookie cutouts. One of which is an angel.
And I, a total wuss and somewhat sentimental due to pregnancy hormones, cannot eat the angels.
It just feels rude. I don’t know why that is, but it feels sinister and cruel. “I like you, Angel. I’ll eat you last.”
Kiddo#2 suggested I could start from the feet up if I felt bad biting off their heads, or wing-sideways. That sounded even worse. I know this is ridiculous because I don’t feel like a homicidal maniac when I eat a traditionally-shaped gingerbread man. It’s not an act of spite. It’s just a cookie.
Still, I can’t bring myself to eat them. So I go with the stars, the Christmas trees, and the snowpersons.
The angels in the household probably have no problem with this, or if they care, they’ve had a good laugh at my expense. (I hope so. The alternatives are too scary.)
Angel#1, sitting with mug of coffee that has a gingerbread human suspended upside-down by its arms against the lip of the cup.
Angel#2: What are you doing?
Angel#1: Waterboarding it.
Angel#2: Cookies can’t repent. They don’t sin.
Angel#1: You eat cookies your way and I’ll eat them my way, okay?
No, probably not. After all, as established many times on this weblog, angels don’t eat, and that’s completely ignoring the whole “Angels WOULDN’T DO THAT KIND OF THING” objection which I keep getting in the back of my head–and which, incidentally, my Patient Husband says as he reads over my shoulder.
Regardless, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to eat the angel cookies, and I avert my eyes when the Kiddos do it. Next year, I’m getting a real gingerbread man cutout, and I’m hiding the angel.
