My favorite gifts (to give and to receive) are either books or something handmade. I do not want to be given any fancy cellophane-wrapped, beribboned, toweringly expensive gift baskets from a shop. Nor will I bestow any. Christmas should be sweet and sentimental, with old movies, old stories, a light dusting of snow, and some delicious homemade baked goods.
The books can come from a second-hand store (travel hint: stop by Slightly Foxed in London when you want to spend a glorious afternoon with used books, friendly folks and the shop dog…) a garage sale, an independent bookseller or even flown in by drone from Amazon.
We tend to decorate with books, and have artful piles by the bedsides, on the coffee table, spilling over the hall table, a Pisa-y tower next to the fireplace mantle and even a few well-thumbed tomes in the hall powder room. My newest book is Emma Thompson’s The Christmas Tale of Peter Rabbit, which is sitting, expectantly, with the other children’s books I haul out of the bookcases for everyone to thumb through when they come home for the holiday. There is nothing quite so warming as spending an hour or two, holed up in your childhood bedroom, falling into Half Magic or Mistress Masham’s Repose or even taking a quick stroll down memory lane with Nancy Drew, or Mr. E.B. White and Wilbur.
I have a mound of Christmas presents in here, on the studio floor – I need to get them wrapped and hidden before the weekend when the pinchers and shakers come back home. At least it is easy to wrap books! I am a great advocate for gift bags for round or irregularly shaped items, but wrapping books is easy – a geometry exercise that is fairly enjoyable; I can revisit eighth grade without too much math anxiety. I imagine that some people, who are expecting expensive, bulky electronics, might be a little sad to look at the stash of neatly wrapped books under the tree on Christmas morning. I’ll give them a couple of Kindle books for good measure!
And when I am finished with defensive wrapping I will be getting down to the business of baking. I love exchanging baked gifts and breads. I would rather that my loved ones spent time in the kitchen than at the mall – unless they are getting that chunky gold bracelet I have been hinting about for years…
I went into our fancy gourmet grocery store yesterday. On artful display were some beauteous and aromatic wreaths and tabletop trees at the entrance. Inside the foyer there was a table covered with slick and shiny gift baskets and boxes. Further inside was another table with boxes of perfectly uniform, petits fours, cut and precisely trimmed with an Xacto knife, and Christmas cookies untouched by helpful children’s hands. And gosh, they were all hideously expensive!
Every year I make vast reserves of fudge. I always give tins of it to the neighbors (except the crazy guy with the leaf blower that is giving me hearing damage even though we live across the street and four houses down) and a tin to our true blue and loyal postman. He has got three children, so I always make his an extra big container. I hope that he likes fudge, and that he knows how much we appreciate all his kindnesses over the years, which have included two large barking dogs.
We had ordered the fourth Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) through Amazon (sorry, independent bookstores!) because it would be delivered on the same day (July 8, 2000 – we looked it up just to be sure) that the book was released in stores. Instead of arriving at the house around 3:00, his usual time, our postman drove straight over to the house from the post office at 8:00 a.m., with the two copies for the Pouting Princess and the Tall Boy. He knew they would want to start reading them right away. Doesn’t that kind of thoughtfulness deserve a pound of homemade fudge every year?
We are not fancy bakers. We know how to deliver butter, sugar, flower and chocolate with efficiency and dispatch. We bake a few batches of sugar cookies, for the fun of rolling and cutting them out, and then decorating them with icing and sprinkles and gumdrops and pretzels and those shiny, but inedible, dragées. We like to make the annual bowls of Chex Mix. Oatmeal cookies, natch. My grandmother’s gingersnaps. And fudge. And these are the little love tokens we seal into the Christmas boxes that we send to our far-flung friends and family. Tucked in with the books, the iTunes cards, the candy canes and the gag gifts are little crumbly bits of love and memories from our kitchen. I hope they are more meaningful than the glowing shimmering pre-wrapped, pre-chosen perfectly impersonal gift baskets from the store.
This is the easiest fudge in the world to make. Honest. You do not need a candy thermometer. And maybe your postman will ring twice!
“That’s your solution? Have a cookie?’ Astrid asked. ‘No, my solution is to run down to the beach and hide out until this is all over,’ Sam said. ‘But a cookie never hurts.”
― Michael Grant, Gone
“Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”
― Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
The World’s Easiest Fudge
Ingredients
3 cups (18 ounces) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 (14 ounces) can Sweetened Condensed Milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper
Melt chocolate chips with sweetened condensed milk and salt in heavy saucepan.
This is important: Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Pour out onto the parchment paper.
Chill for 2 hours, or until firm. Cut into squares.
…….
When you get to London, tell them that I said, “Happy Christmas!” https://foxedbooks.com/
And here are some other baking ideas for Christmas gifts – everything doesn’t need to be sweet, after all.
https://food52.com/blog/9266-the-broke-kitchen-gives-back?preview=true
25 days of Christmas cookies: https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/holidays/article/triple-ginger-cookies
https://www.organicauthority.com/13-easy-paleo-recipes-for-the-holidays
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