Gary Brown: A Christmas full of cookies

The most fulfilling Christmas of my life was the holiday in which I got sick with the flu.

And by fulfilling – full feeling? – I mean I ate a ton of cookies and drank a lot of tasty liquids after I got a fever, felt nauseous, and was quarantined on the holiday.

I think it was the flu. It might have been a bad cold. I could have caught some stomach bug. Or, perhaps it was a respiratory virus. It's been more than six decades since the illness, so forgive me for being vague about the nature of the symptoms. Let's just say that my mother felt my forehead after we finished making Christmas cookies that year, found me heated, cooled me with a cold and damp cloth, then sent me to bed and called me contagious.

Then, as I remember, she gathered up the decorated cookies that I had fingered, put them on a large platter, and covered them up so she could serve them Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to anybody who felt lucky enough to test their immune system.

Hey, this was long before the caronavirus pandamic. Everybody in the family was living in one big petri dish. Anybody who was going to get sick in the household likely already was exposed.

We warned outsiders, of course. Aunts, uncles and cousins were given ample opportunity to beg off coming to our holiday celebration.

"He's sick, he's carrying a fever, and he's coughing, but we've stuck him in his room. So, we're still going to have Christmas dinner," my mom told relatives on the telephone. "We'll let you decide whether you still want to come."

From what I heard, our table was full that year.

Remembering the cookie process

We always made cookies as a family on Christmas Eve.

My mother was the on-the-job head of the operation. The boss. The cookie honcho. The chief cook and bottle washer.

She mixed the dough and prepared the cookie sheets. Dad was the supervisor and primary taste-tester, the latter being a task in which he took great pride, despite the fact that a lot of the job was completed while he sat in a recliner, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

The rest of us, the offspring, the enthusiastic little people, provided the unpaid – unless you count all the cookies you could accidentally break and then eat – child labor that is essential in providing the Christmas spirit for any holiday cookie-making operation.

My two brothers and I kept busy on the baking and assembly lines, doing our duties and licking crumbs from our fingers as frequently as possible, a well-known cookie-making practice which later would serve to heighten the drama in any decisions about whether holiday visitors would decide to eat our germ-ridden products.

Dave, my older brother, initially was charged with rolling out the dough and later graduated to helping mom with the mixing duties. I was chief cookie cutter, mastering all the primary shapes – stars, hearts, circles, snowflakes, trees, candy canes and the occasional more intricate Santa face – that were common at the time we were making cookies. My younger brother specialized in frosting and sprinkles, and he got quite good at it, although his early efforts led him to assume the holiday nickname of "Blob Man."

My sister, who was much younger than the rest of us, eventually took over all the duties and learned them with a high level of skill that she later would pass on to her children. At the time of my memory of making cookies, however, she mostly sat to the side in her high-chair, and dropped crumbles of broken cookies onto the floor. It was a job that needed to be done by someone, so she took up the challenge and the dog was grateful for it.

Becoming ill at the end

We made sugar and shortbread cookies for the most part – cookies that could be decorated and appear festive for the season. Still, my mother threw in a batch or two of chocolate chip, peanut butter or oatmeal raisin cookies that could be mixed in with the rest and sent home as "add-on" gifts for friends and family, or later delivered to neighbors.

That practice was welcomed, at least until the year that I was sick.

I stayed in my room for most of Christmas Eve night and Christmas Day, "bedridden" with comic books and Hardy Boys mysteries, although I spent some time under a blanket on the couch watching television when nobody else but immediate family was in the house. This wasn't a critical illness, just an inconvenient one.

From time to time, a daring aunt or uncle would make their way to my room to wish me a merry Christmas and try to make me feel better with such medically unproven methods as saying "you poor thing." Or, I would walk out into periphery of the celebration, mustering a sick-sounding holiday greeting and waving feebly for effect.

Young cousins, of course, came to my room repeatedly and we played with Christmas toys. Kids don't care about getting sick. The more times they fall ill, the more frequently they get to drink juice or ginger ale instead of Kool-Aid.

In the case of their visits with me, my cousins also got to eat an excessive number of cookies.

You'd be surprised – or maybe not surprised at all – how many older people will turn down an opportunity to pick a cookie or two off an appetizer plate when they know these cookies have been fondled by a kid with the flu. "Thanks, but I'm saving my appetite for what I know will be a delicious dinner!" And, bundles of gift cookies politely will be refused at the end of the day when they conceivably could be contaminated. "Oh, no, we shouldn't. We've got more than we can eat at home."

So, with an unbroken supply chain producing a huge number of what was suspicioned to be a tainted product, there was a glut of uneaten Christmas cookies available in our house that year. Adults, other than my parents, rarely wouldn't touch them. Even the neighbors were leery. Word, apparently, had spread.

They probably should have been recalled and discarded. Instead, they were passed on to me. What did I have to lose? I already was sick. And my brothers or other close relatives were going to get sick from me sooner or later, so they helped me eat them.

Ask any of my siblings or cousins. It was a great Christmas. And now it's a sweet memory.

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown: A Christmas full of cookies