Tradition

The turning point was the chocolate chip cookies: the year my mother did not give me a tin of her Tollhouse cookies as a Christmas present.

Tollhouse cookies were one of her four specialties, the others being two casseroles and a stew. Ever since I had moved way from home at nineteen, my mother had put together a tin of homemade cookies for me each year. I counted on them.

And this was before her stroke, so I did not know what to make of it that Christmas when she gave me a few oddments – her usual style of gift-giving, which was fine by me: random stationary supplies, a box of tea, maybe a nice dishtowel -- but no cookies. I considered if I had done something wrong, but certainly I had done nothing wrong in my mid-40s compared to what I might have done in my mid-20s. She just forgot, I thought. Or more likely was afraid of the oven, an old gas range with an uncertain pilot light.

But no mention of the omission either. My mother would have told me if she had not been able to bake cookies, and would have shown me the two big bags of Tollhouse chips she had bought and not been able to use. And the decorative tin.

I returned home to Baltimore and told my husband I was a little let down. He had counted on the cookies as well. But I realized it was a sign of the times, a small letting go of a small Christmas tradition my mother had created for me as an adult. Amazing to think now about how much more letting go there would be in the next few years.