A rainy dark day again today, but it is a warm day which makes the rain more tolerable. I need to go out to do a few errands a bit later, but I have a short list. Yesterday I had no intention of doing much, but I did. It all started with a potholder. I pulled one out of the drawer and found it had been gnawed. I was grossed out by the idea of a rodent in my kitchen drawer so I pulled out everything, threw away the gnawed and washed the washable. I scrubbed the drawer. In it I found a cache of rice from a bag of rice I had foolishly left in a cabinet. That beastie had to have carried each kernel through two cabinets and up to that second drawer. A feat of sorts I suppose. The rice came from a long time back so I doubt the beastie is still around. My cat has not cabinet watched for a long while. Now I can boast the neatest of kitchen drawers.

It was always an event when my mother made her Christmas sugar cookies. She had silver cookie cutters made from heavy aluminum. I remember a Christmas tree, a bell, a reindeer, Santa carrying his sack and a star. My mother did all the making, all the rolling and all the baking. We got the best job, the decorating. When the cookies were ready for our artistic touches, my mother would put on the table bowls of different colored frosting and sprinkles. My mother let us decorate any way we wanted. The trees, of course, were always green, but we decorated them with sprinkles and colored jimmies (the kind you put on ice cream which I know some of you call sprinkles. Around here they were and are jimmies). The sprinkles looked like sugar and were green or red. I’d concentrate so hard trying to sprinkle the red to look like loops of tinsel on my tree then use the colored jimmies for lights. Santa, of course, had a red suit, a white beard and a white pom-pom on the end of his hat. My sisters’ cookies were always thick with frosting. They were the heaviest to lift. The finished cookies were put on racks until the frosting was dry, but we each got to pick one to eat. Every time, we picked one of our own.

I have the same cookies cutters. One was my mother’s and the rest I collected along the way as did my sister Moe. I put the cutters out in a basket every Christmas. They remind me of that messy kitchen table, the bowls of icing and how proud we all were of our beautifully decorated cookies.