Year of No Sugar (28 page)

“OH help me…I feel so helpless, like I have no will or say in anything,” she wrote in her journal one night. “Like my mom's & dad's say & will comes first and overpowers mine.”

Oof.

Her entry went on to lay the blame for her situation on David Gillespie, from whom I'd derived so much inspiration. As we were getting ready for bed, I tried telling her that Mr. Gillespie was actually a very nice man, and I reminded her that he has six children of his own who also avoid fructose, including one daughter just her age. But Greta wasn't having any of it.

“I hate it! I hate it! I HATE IT!” she exploded, pounding her fists on her mattress. Her eyes were shining with tears.

_______

_______

Now, you'll recall that my oldest daughter does have a bit of a flair for the dramatic. But, believe it or not, this is by far the most displeasure she had expressed with our No-Sugar Year to date, and I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback. Of course, I hated the idea that “my” project was causing my children angst, sadness, ridicule at school…but I always
knew
there had to be that side of it, didn't I? Didn't I?

While Greta's outburst worried me, Ilsa worried me more. One chilly day, we were buying sandwiches at a local shop when she reached out her hand curiously to touch a bowl of something on the countertop near the coffee carafes. When Greta suddenly warned her, “That's
sugar
,” Ilsa actually
flinched
.

Then one night, as she was cutting up a magazine for a craft project, Ilsa showed me an ad for Häagen-Dazs ice cream. “Mama, I'm glad we're not keeping this,” she said. “It hurts me.”

Oh. Shit.

“
Really
, honey?” I stopped what I was doing and looked at her closely.

“Yeah.” She looked at me a little seriously, a little incredulously, as if to say,
What, you didn't
know?

SO…December was shaping up to a busy month around our house, what with me color-coding my pointy hat and broom collection and everything. Directly following the “I hate it” episode, I took a deeeeep breath and asked both girls to look at me from where they sat, half-tucked into their
comforters in their parallel beds, each with its own coral reef of stuffed-animal life-forms.

“Listen,” I said. “I want you to know. I know this year has been really, really hard. And I want you to know how much I appreciate the fact that you've gone along and done this project with me all year long. And it's almost over—the really strict part. It's
almost over
.” I felt like a broken record, even though I meant it. Was there really nothing I could do to assuage this sadness/anger/pain I had willingly invoked in them? Would words—in which I put such complete faith—really fail me?

Then suddenly, as if on cue, Greta sat up and raised her index finger in the air, in a dramatic professor a-ha pose.

“My first biography!” she declared with an impish grin that had—at least for the moment—erased her tears. “My
T-e-r-r-ible
Childhood!”

I smiled. Now,
that
was more like it.

_______

But Christmas was still coming. And it just wouldn't be Christmas without cookies, would it? As much as hanging our stockings and running out of Scotch tape,
cookies
have become an intrinsic part of the way our culture celebrates the holiday season. Every family I know has their own unique and highly personalized cookie tradition.

When I was growing up, at our house it was jelly thumbprints and chocolate chip meringues. Maybe this doesn't sound very Christmassy to you, but all I have to do is taste that buttery dough with a bit of raspberry jam, and I am instantly transported to the Christmases of my childhood. I have since realized that making those two cookies
together
also represented a thrifty way to not let any eggs go to waste:
thumbprints got the yolks, meringues the whites. In my husband's house it was—and still is—his mother's amazingly addictive sugar cookie cut-outs with icing and sprinkles. Every year the big green Tupperware bowl comes out and everyone knows what
that
means: Sharon's Christmas Cookies are not far behind. The famous family story about them involves Sharon making them far in advance one year, in an attempt to get ahead of the holiday mayhem, only to find that the boys had discovered her stash and eaten
all
the cookies in advance—perhaps also to get a jump on the holiday season.

Their punishment was that Christmas itself was, therefore,
cookie-less
.
Gasp!
Can you imagine such a thing?

As an adult, I learned from my cousin Gretchen that our family had a much older cookie tradition than what I had experienced as a child: a recipe that had been brought over from the old country called
flettin
. Every November, weeks before the holiday season really got under way, the family women used to convene and proceed to spend an entire day rolling, cutting, and frying dough. After being sprinkled with a mixture of powdered sugar and cinnamon, the delicate little things would be wrapped in linen and stored in the
attic
(!!) for several weeks to let them “age,” which presumably made them more crunchy and crispy. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure in
my
house, the attic mice and bats would do a number on these cookie baskets similar to what my husband and his brother did to his mother's big green Tupperware bowl.

Nonetheless, in recent years, our family has revived the flettin tradition. It's a bit more of a production these days, since everyone is coming from all across New England rather than from down the block or across town, but all the planning pays off when we finally arrive at one of our houses and settle
in to tie on the aprons. Even with the dough prepared in advance—a very strange recipe involving lots of sour cream, separated eggs, and kneading (who
kneads
cookie dough?)—it
still
takes pretty much all day. We always set up an assembly line with the flettin veterans at the fryers and novices and kids on cookie cutting and sugar-sprinkling detail.

For years, Gretchen had been threatening to send the story of our flettin tradition to the King Arthur Flour Company's magazine
The Baking Sheet
—with hopes they would finally resolve some of our long-standing debates: Has
anyone
else ever heard of this recipe? Do we
really
have to separate and whisk the egg whites, only to knead and pound the dough after their addition? And honestly, was that aging in the attic thing a
real
step, or yet another clever strategy for getting a head start on the holidays?

But Gretchen really did send our story in, and, amazingly, they published it in their 2011 holiday issue.
⁶⁴
I loved the irony of me, toiling away on my No-Sugar blog while simultaneously appearing in a cooking magazine next to a gigantic mountain of sugary fried Christmas cookies.

But there's another irony here, I think. 'Cause you know what? Flettin are a
lot
of work, part of our family history, and a wonderful Christmas tradition, but psst…They're not THAT good. I mean, they're
good
. But is that really what we drive several hours for? What we slave over a hot fryer all afternoon for? “Linen in the attic” instructions notwithstanding, in my opinion, flettin always taste best
that
day, warm from the fryer, freshly sprinkled and eaten while surrounded
by family, some of whom you won't have the opportunity to see again till we do this
next
year. We don't have much in the way of family heritage, so Gretchen and I are holding on to flettin tight; it's not really about the cookies as much as about the fact that they're
our
cookies.

As it turns out, this year the family
didn't
manage to get together for a flettin day, so I didn't have to confront what it would mean in light of No Sugar—too bad. I was kind of looking forward to attempting a dextrose batch, and I felt pretty sure my family would've humored me, although they've been balking at my suggestion to replace the frying Crisco with lard, the way our ancestors would've surely fried flettin prior to the invention of hydrogenated oil in 1911.

Instead, I contented myself creating some oxymoronic recipes at home such as No-Sugar Sugar Cookies and Dextrose Gingerbread. They were getting good reviews from my helpers and harshest critics—the kids. Thus, despite all our fretting, I had a sneaking suspicion that a No-Sugar Christmas might just work out fine.

Later on, I wouldn't be so sure.

_______

Grandma Sharon's Christmas Cookies were going to be our final treat for the year—it was one more thing we just couldn't imagine going without. We arrived at Grandma's after the compulsory marathon drive to get there—exhausted and feeling like sardines freed from our tin—and
there it was
on the kitchen counter: the big green Tupperware bowl. We didn't even have to look. We knew it was filled with frosted, sprinkled cookies in shapes of Santa and Christmas trees.

The fact that Sharon had been ultra-efficient as usual
presented a bit of a problem for me, however, one that I hadn't anticipated: we weren't going to be eating Christmas cookies all week; we could only have them on one day, for one dessert. How were we going to stare at that bowl
all week
, knowing those cookies were inside it? Ack! Was this some new form of torture?

Additionally, Sharon likes a sweet now and again, so a blue glass bowl of Hershey's kisses or hard candies is an ever-present fixture on her counter. On top of that, add the myriad treats that inevitably appear as presents or hostess gifts this time of year, not to mention the more ordinary stuff: there was juice in the fridge, ice cream in the freezer—hey, this
wasn't our house
! I knew my mother-in-law wasn't
trying
to torture us with things we couldn't have—after all, she had jumped through flaming hoops trying to find a Christmas Day ham that contained no sugar glaze of any kind. (All to no avail, as it turns out. Such a thing as an unglazed holiday ham in December is rarer than plaid shorts at a motorcycle rally.)

I knew Sharon probably thought we were crazy—make that definitely thought it—and that she had ever so politely refrained from actually saying so out loud, which I appreciated. But I was pretty sure that I was being paranoid that she was actually taunting us with that bowl of Hershey's Kisses. After all, that bowl was
always
there. And Greta and Ilsa weren't the only grandkids. It just
wasn't our house
.

Right?

We were in the home stretch, which may have been the sole thing that saved us. We toughed it out. We sucked it up. We knew in a few days Christmas would bring for us not only a visit from old St. Nick, but also a visit from the Christmas Cookie Fairy, and then it would only be a few more days until
our year,
The
Year, The Year of Mommy Using Up Her Lifetime Quotient of Unreasonable Requests would be officially over. We were
so close
.

_______

Maybe I should've known Aunt Carol's house would be the hardest of all. Why? Because Aunt Carol is great. She is the kind of relative who not only bakes fourteen different kinds of cookies for the holidays, but also bakes enough to give every relative who's in town a huge sampler plate of them to take home as well. She's been known to make her own chocolates and to decorate kids' birthday cakes so elaborately they might do for a medium-size wedding reception.

I identify with Aunt Carol in this respect: food is an expression of love. And up until this year, I too brought a sweet gift for all the relatives that I had made in my kitchen. Some years I brought homemade jams, others I made little cakes. In the years when our kids were really small and making something myself wasn't happening, I brought locally made gifts, like maple-sugar cotton candy and maple cream spread. Sensing a theme here? If food can equal love, then I guess sugar can equal Christmas.

As I mentioned, this year we were spending the holidays in Michigan with my husband's extended family, as we do every alternate year. A good eleven-hour drive from home, the area is a suburban ocean between the city-shores of Toledo and Detroit, and there's just a lot more of
everything
there: people, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, chain restaurants, billboards, freeways, parking lots, sirens, you name it. And it's not just the negative stuff. There's more variety there too: we can't get authentic Greek or Lebanese or Indian food in Vermont, but we can get it there. Coming from our little
Vermont town of a thousand residents, the sheer contrast can create cultural whiplash.

But back to Aunt Carol. Since long before I ever happened upon the scene, my husband's family has been getting together to exchange gifts on Christmas Eve. This year, Aunt Carol had volunteered to host, so we all arrived in our Christmas coats and fancy shoes at 6:05 on the dot.

Immediately, it was a
problem
. Greta took one look at the usual spread—cookies on the counter, fudge in a pretty glass basket, local Dietsch's chocolate samplers open on the sideboard—and quickly came to the conclusion that this was going to be the
worst Christmas ever
.