See this little girl?  When I look at this picture of myself at a long-ago family holiday, she seems a little, I don’t know, stunned and overwhelmed.  Not unhappy, just in some kind of shock. Apparently the holidays have always been a bit of a mixed bag for me emotionally.

In the run-up to Christmas in my house, my role is to supply the sweets.  It started a while ago when the person who used to do it, my brother’s mother-in-law, was “lost” to us through divorce.   Plus, I’m the only one from out of town, so hosting dinner isn’t something I can contribute.

I take a lot of satisfaction in it, which is good because it’s a lot – about 50 dozen in total this year, 9 different varieties.  It’s a big family, and at least in my mind, different people have different favorites.  Then, some year ago as in most families, we added the gluten-free crowd, and I learned some new tricks.  Plus, every few years, I just get bored and throw in something new.

Again, because I’m the one from “away”, I usually travel for holidays – in fact, the pandemic years were the only years in my adult life I woke up in my own house on Christmas morning.  So this year, which is either a “revenge” travel year or an “on the bubble” year depending on your point of view, we made the decision to have a family of two Christmas in our own house.  Turns out, it was also a blizzard year, so it’s doubtful our car trip would have gone well anyway.

But the cookies still made the trip.  And I think a picture of me this Christmas morning would have been a little less stunned-looking.  A gift from sixty-something me to that little girl.