Picking up right where I left off

When I got back from Africa it was Christmas time. The tree vendors were doing business on corners in the city, my friends were throwing parties with Bouche de Noel, and even our confused and troublesome landlord had dropped off a bottle of wine as a holiday gift. Steph and I had spent the last nights in Morocco on hard twin beds in some shifty hotels. One night we locked ourselves into our room in a fit of protection against a drunk man in the hallway. 'La France! La France!' he kept calling to lure us out. Luckily, we knew better, and stocked with a good stash of meringues, macaroons, and sugared peanuts we happily staid in, munching and smoking hookah to our hearts content. Those last few nights, travel-weary and done with defending ourselves in the streets against imposing shop owners and louche men, we lied on our beds in the dark, dreaming of the gingerbread houses we would make when we got home, the spices we were going to have to smuggle past customs, and the famed Brooklyn pizza Steph promised her parents would bring when they came to meet us at the airport in Newark. As the travel gods would have it, we made it home no problem, luxuriating in the free-flowing wine of Air-France and the chance to catch up on movies while we traversed the last great expanse before home. We nearly missed our connection in Paris, and then a security guard made me unpack all of the twelve soup bowls, the ladle made of a squash goard, the eighteen juice glasses, and other miscellaneous souvenirs I was toting in a ramshackle market bag. Miraculously, only one little glass broke in the process, and even more miraculously, she let me take everything on the plane. Despite the fact that my luggage got lost three times before I finally made it back to Brooklyn for the New Year, I am home again, writing from the kitchen.

When my mother picked me up in Detroit for the holidays I lodged right into the lists of food we were going to cook. I had spices to make a proper Moroccan tagine and dried Hibiscus flowers to brew jus de bissap, but finally back in my own country I was most excited about Christmas cookies. We were driving down the grey strip of highway in Detroit, past foreclosure signs, and billboards advertising strip clubs, when I announced that I'd decided our Christmas tree should be entirely edible. My mother, just happy to have me at arm's reach, got a goofy look on her face, the cogs in her artist's brain already spinning with possibilities. "What exactly do you mean?" she asked. I meant Americans waste far too much money, energy, and wrapping paper on Christmas. For years the holiday has made me sick with anxiety, but I still wanted to make cookies, even if the calorie count, like everything else about the holiday seemed entirely excessive, if not totally wasteful.

No one likes to take the decorations down off the Christmas tree, so why not leave them off to begin with? What about gingerbread cookies as ornaments? How about cranberry and popcorn garlands that the birds could nibble on when the tree got thrown in the backyard to decompose? And why cut down a living tree anyway? Why not put the presents under a little rosemary plant on the dining room table? On this last point I had to concede, at least for now. My dad happens to be in the business of selling beautiful Christmas trees, and my family happened to not be ready to entirely do away with tradition. As for la fin de 2007, the year in which my pen met my palate, it ended on a sweet note, the three of us licking our fingers of lemon icing and brushing double spice gingerbread crumbs from our sweaters. At the last report from the homestead, the deer are making off with the leftovers.