Mommy's Little Helpers
Written By Ann Hodgman
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Recipes
Now, listen people. It's great to have your kids make Christmas presents for the relatives, but let's not go nuts.
When I was a little girl, I had so many adult relatives that churning out homemade Christmas presents seemed like drudgery. Hour after hour, day after day — or so it seems in retrospect — I sweated away, sticking cloves into oranges, cross-stitching dish towels, or cutting rounds of tissue paper to string together into "shaving balls." (A grandpa or uncle was supposed to tear off one round a day to clean his razor.) Looking back, I imagine that my mother must have found organizing this process as painful as I found accomplishing it. After all, she was plenty busy at Christmas herself, and listening to me moan "When will this be over?" wasn't all that festive.
As my younger sisters and brother grew up and were drafted into the homemade-Christmas-present chain gang, it occurred to my mother that homemade food would be a lot easier for us to make — and perhaps more appreciated by the recipients as well. Using wet fingers to tear off a 1-inch round of tissue paper and clean a razor with it couldn't have been all that safe. (If my uncles and grandfathers even used those shaving balls, I mean.) And who really likes the smell of cloves?
Making Christmas treats was faster, more fun, and way easier to do in bulk. You can quintuple a recipe; you can't grow extra hands for cross-stitching dish towels. The packaging was an adventure too. All year we saved margarine tubs and coffee cans to decorate with wrapping paper and glitter. On top of that, we were allowed to use foil pans for some of our stuff, like the homemade fudge. Foil pans were too expensive for our family of six to use the rest of the year, so they seemed like a wonderful example of "Christmas comes but once a year."
When I grew up and had my own children, we went straight to homemade food for the grandparents at Christmas. (Well, okay, there was that one disastrous year when I had my daughter Laura make stationery, and the process was so boring and labor-intensive that she ended up giving about three pieces to each grandma.)
The recipes below are all foolproof and can be multiplied with no trouble. They've been intensively tested, since my two sisters also make edible Christmas presents — not a shaving ball in sight! Just delicious treats that work as well for teachers and other grown-ups as they do for relatives. My siblings and I also declared a permanent thank-you note amnesty: None of our kids ever have to write a note to any of their uncles and aunts. But let's discuss that fraught topic another time. For now, there's cooking to do.
