The Cookie Connection

By Kathy Dean

In our family, Christmas means cookies. My sister and I grab the holiday magazines as soon as they hit the shelves, just as our mother did, and look for new cookies to bake.

There’s one cookie that’s a must—our grandmother’s kifle (pronounced KEY-flea, meaning crescent). It’s a sweet dough stuffed with poppyseed, apricot or walnut fillings. Through the years, we’ve dropped the walnut and substituted raspberry, plum or blueberry, depending on what we can find at the store.

Kifle was one of the recipes Grandma brought from Hungary, so we suspect it has a long history in our family. When she was in her 80s, Grandma agreed to share the recipe with me. I expected her to dig out a well-worn scrap of paper.

There was no recipe card. It was stored in her memory, and the measurements were given to me in pinches, handfuls and half-a-bowls. I did my best to translate it into U.S. pre-metric terms, though I still feel I’m guessing at the whole process.

And it is a process—this is no simple cookie. It involves dissolving yeast in warm milk, adding flour and letting it rise overnight. The dough is mixed, rolled and cut to size, then filled and folded before baking.

The ingredients are heart-stopping—a pound of butter, half a dozen egg yolks and a cup of sour cream. It’s still better than the version I found in a 1954 cookbook, which called for beef suet instead of butter.

One recipe yields 200 cookies, not nearly enough by my mother’s reckoning. Visit that gets pride of place year after year.

And then there’s Frosty. He’s my holiday tradition. My parents bought Frosty when I was a child and he decorated our front porch during the holiday season when I was a boy. He’s made of plastic, stands about 2 ½ feet tall from toe to top hat and glows joyfully from the 60-watt bulb within.

After my parents died, Frosty moved to our house. I thought he would delight my family. I was wrong.

His reception in our home has been, well, about as warm as his name. My kids only tolerate Frosty. My wife has no use for him at all; she finds him, in a word, tacky. If I didn’t climb up into the attic every Christmas and fetch him myself, Frosty wouldn’t show up among the many lovely decorations that fill our home each holiday season.

But when the holidays come around again this year, I fully intend for Frosty to be glowing in one corner of the house or another, welcoming the season and reminding me of home. He’s my tradition, if no one else’s.