The Feedsack Dress

Putting puzzles together

In the years before television ruled, my mother found a solution to what the different generations could do after a big Christmas dinner and the thrill of new toys had passed.

With the table in our farm kitchen cleared and the middle leaf removed, she would bring out a plywood board about three-foot square and place it in the middle of the table. Then she’d open a  big jigsaw puzzle, dump the hundreds of pieces on the table, and start the unification process by putting a corner piece on the plywood. Sometimes she’d work alone for a little while before anyone joined her.

During the afternoon everyone would come to help. Usually at least three of us stared at the deceptive little pieces at once. Our strategy was for each person or pair to concentrate on one section—a corner, the center, one edge. The youngest would attach themselves to an adult for a little while and then skip away. Every few minutes someone would describe what color and shape of piece was needed to complete a specific item shown in the picture on the box, and everyone would look.

While our eyes and hands stayed busy, we didn’t need them to talk and to listen. We cheered each other on rather than competing as we did in games. After the frenzy of the holiday, we relaxed and enjoyed the challenge, and each other. 

—Carolyn Mulford

 

Decorating holiday cookies

I suspect that my mother dreaded Christmas. For her, it meant extra hours in the kitchen making treats reserved for the holidays. Naturally my two sisters and I helped, especially in making and decorating sugar cookies. She never let on that she didn’t look forward to it or that our assistance prolonged the job.

She mixed and rolled out the dough and we cut out circles and Christmas shapes—trees, bells, Santa heads, angels—with metal cookie cutters.We needed lots of these because that’s what everyone took to the Christmas program at the one-room school.

My mother or older sister made a powdered sugar icing in a big bowl and put about half of that into two or three smaller bowls. We added red food coloring to one bowl, green to another, and sometimes yellow or blue to another.

We spread the white frosting on most of the round cookies and then either sprinkled colored sugar crystals on them or made faces of patterns with red hots, the pill-sized candies that I loved. I put red hots on the green-frosted Christmas trees and on Santa’s white face as eyes, too.

My more artistic and patient sisters experimented more with combining colored frostings, creating white ropes on green trees and outlining white bells in red. When an experiment failed, that cookie was condemned to go right into our mouths. We had a lot of failures with our first batch. As appetites dulled, hands became more skillful.

A few days before Christmas each year I get the urge to bake cookies. Usually I overcome it. Maybe next year.

 —Carolyn Mulford