Joyce to the World

Christmas baking is one of my absolute favorite parts of the holiday. There’s nothing as cozy and heartwarming to me than cuing up the Christmas jams, flicking on the lights of the tree, lighting a fire in the fireplace (if it’s not 80 degrees), and breaking out the mixer and the rolling pin to make a good old-fashioned mess. I must have inherited this from my lovely, always festive Granny, Joyce Rouse. She absolutely loved Christmas and sweets! So, it is perfectly on-brand that one of Granny’s favorite traditions was baking cocoons at Christmastime. She and her dear friend Mrs. Celina (who both of my dad’s sisters called “Nanny,” but I’m not sure whose Nanny she actually was) would pick a Sunday a few weeks before Christmas, turn up the Christmas music, take over every surface of the kitchen, cover it all with Rouses paper bags (as a substitute for wax paper) and make cocoons. Anyone who stopped by might help for a while, especially my aunts Cindy and Jeaneen, but if they did a step wrong they’d have to redo it! Cocoons are nothing complicated but they are a process — make, cool, shape just right, bake, cool, dip, and dip again.

We reminisced about Granny’s cocoons for years. We knew there was a recipe somewhere, but no one could find it. My aunts tried a recipe they found online that looked about right, but it wasn’t it. A few summers ago, Aunt Jeaneen was packing to move, and it was like Christmas in July — the original cocoon recipe resurfaced! The news spread throughout the fam, and we made a plan to make them together that winter. When we did, the younger generation was mostly relegated to doing the dirty work. We were a mess, but it was a blast. (The prosecco we were sipping surely helped with both the sugar marks on our clothes and all the giggles.) Aunt Neen had containers ready — like Granny used to — for when the cocoons were done, so we could bring some home and drop some off to other family members and friends. Granny used to hide about half the containers in a secret spot so that they would last longer. Cocoons have a tendency to disappear quickly in the Rouse house.

I’ll let you in on my little secret — I don’t even eat cocoons! I don’t eat pecans — I’m not allergic to them, I just can’t stand them. But if any of my Rouse fam calls me to make cocoons, I will be there with (jingle) bells on, because the beauty of Christmas traditions is that baking cookies — like decorating the tree, like putting out cookies for Santa — is about so much more than baking cookies.

Joyce Rouse