By: Erin McKee

When I was young, my nana felt very strongly that my brother’s and my horizons needed to be expanded. Which is not to say that they were not already plenty broad: We had seen Mayan ruins in Mexico, climbed waterfalls and poled rivers in Jamaica, and hiked in the Rockies. Yet somehow, because my parents had no interest in taking me and my brother to see, for example, a revival of “The King and I” when we were eight and six years old (respectively), we were uncultured swine. 

My nana was utterly out of touch with what elementary school students would find engaging, and she dragged us around St. Louis throughout the year to the symphony (we only showed signs of life during the “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” song), Shakespeare in the Park (everyone knows elementary school students go wild for “The Merchant of Venice,” particularly outdoors in the height of a Midwestern summer), and the Muny (what could possibly go wrong with “Cats” performed in 94-degree heat with 90% humidity?). But this was a battle my father, her son, had lost as a child and no longer had the will to fight as an adult. 

So it was that in December of 1999, my nana took us to see “The Nutcracker” at the Fox in St. Louis, Missouri, our hometown. I never had any qualms about visiting the Fox, that strange and surreal haven of a bygone era with its baroque columns and heavy velvet curtains. Trussed up in my Nice Dress, white tights, and black patent leather shoes, I felt like I could be Samantha, my sweet American Girl doll from 1904. My qualms more often had to do with the reason for the visit. I had very little faith in my nana’s ability to choose a play my brother and I would enjoy, and though I was familiar with the general story of “The Nutcracker,” I was certain this show, as I would have said at the time, would also “suck.” Lucky for Nana, the show was a phantasmagorical fireworks display of color, sparkle, light and sound. I wanted to be Clara as she lit the candles on her family’s tree. I wanted to dance with the Sugarplum Fairies. As we walked to the car, my brother swashbuckled each step of the way as though he were a toy soldier. We floated in the door at home on a spun-sugar cloud.

Life at home, however, had descended into flour-coated chaos. 

My mother had a clear idea of what the holidays should look like for her family. Our live Christmas tree barely fit in the house and dripped with more lights than the Vegas Strip, complete with very classy matching glass orb ornaments. Despite not being religious, there was a beautiful nativity scene under the tree. Gorgeous evergreen swag with red velvet bows looped down the banisters. She wrangled her older brother into a dramatic reading of “The Night Before Christmas,” the cousins gathered at his feet for a precious photo opportunity. All the presents were finished with handmade, elaborate bows. Dinner was a massive roast. The silver was polished, the linens came out, and the candles were lit.

And—perhaps most importantly—the cookies were baked.

Not just any cookies, mind. Brandy fruit bars. Coconut macaroons. Cranberry kiss cookies. Chocolate and mint sandwiches. She wouldn’t even entertain the suggestion of chocolate chip cookies or—god forbid—gooey butter cookies (a St. Louis delicacy of mere thousands of calories), just absently clicked her tongue and continued her frantic scrabbling of a multi-page grocery list.

In 1999, my mother had gotten it into her head that her holiday display needed more, specifically more from the motherland, Germany. So she reached out to her side of the family for family cookie recipes.

Oma, her mother, doesn’t cook, much less bake. Oma sent my mother on to Tante Rosi.

Tante Rosi baked more from memory. She was sure her daughter (my mother’s cousin), Monika, probably had something written down somewhere.

Monika had something written down, sure. She read the recipe to my mother over the phone: Nussstängeli, a hazelnut finger cookie, but with the Loris family twist of meringue topping. Exactly the kind of ambitious cookie that would be the crowning achievement of my mother’s multi-tiered cookie display.

So it was that my brother and I returned from our night at the Fox to find the following scene:

Flour, everywhere.

Countertops covered in failed, broken cookies.

Dirty bowls, whisks, spoons.

Sheets and sheets and sheets of parchment paper.

And our mother, tied up in the phone cord, bright red and near tears.

“It keeps falling apart, though!” she wailed into the phone. “Something is missing!” A beat. “No, Mom, I followed the recipe exactly!” Another beat. “I didn’t write it down wrong, Mom.” 

My brother slipped from the room like a shadow. I slid onto a stool to behold the chaos, maybe help, if I could. I propped my chin on my fists and toed off my patent leather shoes. My mother gave me a quick wave as she listened to whatever my oma was saying. We waited.

And then, it was like my mother had found a missing puzzle piece in her pocket. The light clicked on, and the fog cleared.

“But why would she do that?” she asked her mother quietly, her lip wobbling.

Monika, it seemed, had been unwilling to share her mother’s recipe with her unsuspecting younger cousin. So Monika gave my mother a faulty recipe, one with ingredients missing and ratios off. And no matter what my mother did, she could not find the flaw, and no one would tell her.

Once off the phone, having realized the fault was not in her replication of the recipe but in the recipe itself, she began to cry—in sadness, in betrayal, in pain, in anger—and slam the crumbled broken fingers of nussstängeli into the trash can. She rage-cleaned the kitchen, scrubbing it clean of hours of effort and failure. I kept her company, sliding across the linoleum in my white tights to put things away. I pestered her with questions, not understanding how someone could provide a recipe so incorrectly, not realizing that this had been subtle familial sabotage.

We had begun spending less time with the Loris side of the family—the part of the family descended from my oma’s brother, my great uncle—in previous years, in that natural way that clefts begin to form in family trees as the branches expand. But rather than viewing it as a natural process, Monika had taken it personally, and when my mother reached out for help, Moni had taken the opportunity to take a chip out of my mother’s Christmas fantasy.

I think that’s when my mother’s eyes began to clear. Such pretense. Such pageantry. And for who? Not my uncle, who was usually drunk by the time he had to read the classic poem and ended up fiercely annoyed by the request. Not my oma, who was always unimpressed. Not my nana, who brought her own cookies to quietly push my mother’s aside and still insisted that my brother and I could use more culture.

Christmas these days is a small affair. My mom, my dad, my brother. There’s still evergreen swag, the tree is still absurdly huge. But now the ornaments are a crazy mishmash: skating penguins, a silver Buddha, a sexy Vixen, Santa with a Coke, and an elephant in a hot air balloon. The nativity that never matched our beliefs has been replaced by a hilariously complex Christmas village, orchestrated by my father, who each year becomes a city planner/engineer (“See, up on the hill is the school and the lodge, and this is the river that cuts through the village to this little pond, and see, that’s where the kids are ice skating, right by the toy store!”). Last year, instead of a roast, we made green and red enchiladas, much to my mother’s comical horror. (They were fantastic.) Instead of dragging ourselves to pretentious shows, we always watch “A Muppet Christmas Carol,” and we all sing along. 

Once, recently, there were even gooey butter cookies.

By: Hannah Chun ’25

Whenever the days are slowly getting colder, you know that something in the air is changing. Whatever you do, it is always different from before. The way you breathe and maybe even the way you act. While everything is slowly coming together and you get used to the winter season my sister and I never hesitate to bake together. We love welcoming new weather outside with food that matches our upcoming mood, and for us, every season is compatible with other kinds of recipes. Since my sister and I do not get to see each other that often, because we are both busy with our own lives, we really never get the chance to share our preferences while making food with one another. In winter, mostly around the middle of December, when everyone around us is in the mood for Christmas, however, it is different. We always take our time from daily life to spend a whole afternoon together and bake anything that fits our frame of mind at that current hour. And somehow we always come to the decision to make cinnamon rolls with each other. Even tho this does not sound special in any way, because it is one of the most common pastries during the Christmas time it was never enough for us. Cinnamon rolls are simple, easy to make, and really delicious. One thing that was important to us was to share our baking with other people to make them be a part of the moment, and sharing has been easy. The first time making them we failed really badly, but because of the fact that we were six and nine years old, we’ve improved a lot. We start making them by preparing the dough, which takes us not that long while exchanging everything new in our lives. We make the best conversations during this time and our connection always becomes stronger, when we reconnect. It is not like we don’t have a strong bonding, but on these specific occasions, it is like we put all our worries and problems and lock them in another room for these few hours sitting together in the kitchen. When it comes to the part where the cinnamon-butter mixture is getting applied to the rolled dough, we always fight for who is allowed to do that, cause it is the most fun part. Most of the time my sister wins, with the reasoning she would not experience this as often anymore because she would move out, which is looking back questionable to say, because we both know this tradition would never happen without her being in the picture. It would just feel wrong. The cinnamon rolls usually take a while to get fully finished, but when they are done they get crowned with a sweet cream cheese sauce on top of it. We normally make a fire in our living room and present our in some way simple pastry, but it is just more than that. Making cinnamon rolls with my sister sounds so normal and usual, but it is our way to appreciate the upcoming time by fitting our food into the temperature. It feels like we are shaping the start of letting go of all mistakes we made this year, by taking such a simple moment and making our path to turning it into a moment of peace. The moment when our family sits together and everyone just enjoys the simplicity of the cinnamon rolls, we realize that again a year has passed. The sweetness takes us back to last year when we did the exact same thing, and we think about everything that has already happened and how we grew as a person. This is the moment we realize how important the simple things in life are. In the end, little moments like this are life, and through our cinnamon rolls tradition, I really got to acknowledge that way more.