On Peanut Butter Fudge and Christmas Memories

I have always loved holiday baking, but I have always found myself waaaaaay overwhelmed with the whole idea of it.  I may have fantasies of being that wonderful mom who just bakes away all day, much to the delight of my absolutely perfect-in-every-way family, but the reality is that life often takes control, and the baking just doesn't get done.  If I even attempt to make a stab at it I often end up as a very grumpy elf or in tears by the end of the day.  Herman often has said that he would much rather have a happy mom than lots of goodies for Christmas, so after years of attempting to create the perfect Christmas yummies I finally decided to sit back and relax about the whole thing.  If the candies were made, hurray!  If the divinity turned into a gooey mass of nothingness, oh well!

This should have been a year when the holiday baking took a back seat to just living life.  I have had a hard time getting ready for Christmas at all this year.  I think our month in China threw me off a bit, and I feel like I missed a month somewhere.  It feels like it should be Thanksgiving.  I did finally go out and do my Christmas shopping a few days ago.  I have never put it off this long, and waiting until the end means that I have to suffer through the crazy holiday crowds.  I said after pushing through the mass of humanity in Chinese shopping areas I would never again complain about Christmas crowds at the mall in Springfield or at our Wal-mart (oh, how I hate Wal-mart!).  But I think I have noticed that the huge crowds here aren't as friendly as the ones in China for some reason.  I think that it might be that we are just not accustomed to these sorts of crowds, so they make us grumpier.  In China that's all they experience, so they just deal with them.  For whatever reason, I still ended up complaining about the crowds.  Oh well.  I survived and our shopping is done.

But that brings us to the last three days at the Blau house.  Even though I am still getting myself together after the addition of Minsy to our family and our month-long trip to get her, I found that this would be the year that I would go all out and bake.  I'm not sure what came over me.  It really isn't the best year for this.  Herman is right in the middle of a killer diet that has already led to him losing more than 20 pounds.  Yea!  He doesn't want to eat all of this stuff.  I am trying to lose my "adoption pregnancy" weight as well, so I don't want to eat all of it.  The kids would be more than happy to eat it all, but I'm not a total martyr.  Laney has been completely gung ho about Christmas traditions this year, almost demanding that we establish lovely new traditions like so many of the wonderful bloggers that she follows.  I keep telling her to write them down and use them with her own family when she gets older.  We already have enough fun things to do.  But still I think she is a bit disappointed that we aren't nearly as cool as some other Christmas enthusiasts out there.  Darn you Pinterest for giving her all of those ideas that I will never be able to meet!  But, anyway, I thought that Laney might really enjoy making some holiday breads, cookies, and candies with me.

Well, I went on Allrecipes and made a good list of things that would be fun to make and headed to Wal-mart to grab the ingredients I would need.  I collected everything and headed home, only to find that Laney was already pulled in several different directions with babysitting for others and other activities.  Still I decided to just do a thing or two at a time and see where I ended up.  Unlike previous years, things worked out wonderfully, and I was able to make so many things.  Even my divinity, which hasn't turned out right since I was a teenager, actually hardened as it should have.  I have worked fairly steadily for the past three days, even managing to take time away to keep the house relatively clean and the clothes laundered.  The kids have all bathed, and there have been no major calamities that have befallen us.  It is a real Christmas miracle!  I don't know what happened.

This morning I was finishing up the bulk of my pre-Christmas cooking, and I decided to make peanut butter fudge.  I settled in, threw on another Jane Austen BBC miniseries, and got to work.  As I taste tested my creation I was thrown back into a memory of Christmases long ago as a child when we would travel to Iowa to visit my Grandma and Grandpa Landis.  I remembered Grandma's peanut butter fudge.  I don't know exactly why this memory came to me.  I think that it is because although we made and ate a lot of homemade candies at our house, we never made peanut butter fudge, so Grandma's peanut butter fudge was unique.  The taste of it stuck with me through all of these years.  I still remember the feeling of coming to their house and seeing the holiday yummies laid out on their kitchen table.  I still can't hear about mincemeat pie without thinking of Grandma and Grandpa Landis -- probably because I was never brave enough to try it.  The name made me think of candied beef for some reason, and that thought totally grossed me out.  I still have never tried the stuff.  Maybe I'll be brave about it someday.  But I do remember Grandma's candies.  As I tasted my own little treat I thought of her and smiled.

Remembering this Christmas memory because of food made me think that there might be some importance to all of these goodies that I'm making.  We don't really make these sorts of foods any other time during the year, and maybe as my kids are older and away from home they might think of our family Christmases when they were younger and remember this time with some fondness.  Maybe they'll travel home for Christmas and share the joys of the season with us, and their children will think of these candies and goodies when they think of their super awesome Granny Blau.  I don't know.  I'm just feeling a bit nostalgic today.  I'm just happy that taking this time to make a ton of very-bad-for-you sweets brought back warm memories of Christmases long ago.  We may add a few pounds this week, but it's worth it, in my opinion, just for the opportunity to create new family memories for my children while I remember the memories of the past.  Merry Christmas!

And, by the way, does anyone want a plate of yummy goodness?  We have lots to spare!