Valentines and Taming Tigers

I’m not really a fan of Valentine’s Day – never have been. Possibly it’s a case of sour grapes because I’ve never really been anybody’s valentine, except maybe once. It’s a holiday that has evolved to focus on “stuff” and equates love with roses or diamonds or candy. I can’t count the number of times in my practice that I sat with clients who were angry over what they considered to be their partner’s inadequate attempts at buying their love on Valentine’s Day, and tried to be non-judgmental and accepting of their feelings. The expectations tied up with this day, frankly, I find obscene.  

The other reason I eschew Valentine’s Day is all the darned sugar. Chocolate and more chocolate. Little hard sugar hearts with Be Mine and other endearments stamped on them. Red and pink M&M’s. Red and pink marshmallow hearts from the people who bring us Peeps at Easter.  Beautifully decorated valentine themed cupcakes at three bakeries I pass twice daily in Grand Central Terminal. This holiday represents another sugar gauntlet.  

  

My first memory of Valentine’s Day is from the first grade when my mom baked her highly addictive sour cream sugar cookies for my class. She frosted them in pink and neatly wrote each child’s name in white frosting on their own cookie. They were beautiful and I was very proud to deliver each one to the proper child when we had our party in the classroom. Back in those days, we exchanged valentines with each other, but the rule was that everybody had to receive a valentine. The teacher would send home a list of every child’s name in the class and whether or not you were friends with everyone, there was no exclusion allowed. I remember very carefully picking out valentines for my classmates from the box my mother bought for me, being sure to save the pretty ballerina card for Christine, who I thought was the prettiest girl in my class. And I secretly hoped that of all the valentines I would receive that day, one of them would be a ballerina. There was always one in every box of store bought valentines.     

Every year it was the same. I crossed my fingers and prayed that I would be the recipient of the ballerina card – or the princess card – or whatever card featured some character who was ultra-feminine and pretty. Somehow in my mind if that card was bestowed on me, it meant that the giver thought that I was ultra-feminine and pretty. I didn’t feel that way inside but looked for any external “evidence” I could get.

My second solid memory of Valentine’s Day was in 8^th grade when I sat at a card table set up in our dining room, listening to the Four Seasons sing Working My Way Back to You on the radio while I made valentines from red and pink construction paper, paper doilies, glitter, and stickers for my four best girl friends. There were no boys in the equation – well, except for Judy and her boy-next-door, but that didn’t quite count. He went to a different school so during our 8 - 3 school day, we could pretend he didn’t exist and Judy just belonged to us.  

In the 9^th grade, we had Mr. Greiner for social studies – global studies I think it was called. Mr. Greiner was a very tall and solid man and he was an avid sports fan. The first week of school, he gave us a current events pop quiz, as he was apt to do, and one of the questions was to name a professional basketball team. My answer? The Harlem Globetrotters. I mean, really, what did I know about basketball (or any sport, for that matter)!!! I’m sure he either laughed himself silly or just pegged me for a loser.

Mr. Greiner’s other chief characteristic was that he was mean. Physically mean.  He had a reputation for banging boys up and down the hallway against lockers. Bad boys, boys who mouthed off, or made him mad in some way.  It would happen and word about who was the latest victim passed through the halls like wild fire. Back then, teachers got away with that kind of behavior.  Even though I wasn’t a boy, and didn’t mouth off, I still feared Mr. Greiner. The sound of his booming voice made my heart do triple-flips and my knees need to sit.

What does this have to do with Valentine’s Day? Well, somehow, I think from our gym teacher who we believed was having a romance with him, my girlfriends and I found out that Mr. Greiner’s birthday was Valentine’s Day. By February, we had learned that one way to get on his good side was to produce obsessively neat and detailed maps of the countries we were studying. He would give the class a list of all the elements of a country that were to be included – rivers, lakes, mountains, anything of geological/geographical import – and order us to produce maps to scale. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the amount of time spent working on the maps in our local library and the magnitude of his grudging approval of our efforts as he handed them back in class.  We decided, my girlfriends and I, that we could further cement his approval (and perhaps a guarantee to never be the victims of the locker-bounce) by acknowledging his birthday. So on February 13 after school, we gathered in my mom’s kitchen and baked a heart-shaped birthday cake, which we frosted and decorated for Mr. Greiner, and took to school the next morning.

It was a successful undertaking. We studied his reaction carefully as we surprised him with the cake. We’d rarely seen Mr. Greiner smile, unless it was sadistically, and certainly had never heard him speak in anything but a booming and intimidating voice. But that day, he glowed a bit red from embarrassment, smiled broadly, and actually bowed to us as he said simply, “Thank you.” 

The tiger was tamed. An aggressor on your side is better than an aggressor on the opposite side.

Mom's Christmas Cookies

Christmas has always been the hands-down winner of the My Favorite Holiday vote. I’ve loved everything about it for as long as I can remember (except for the real-tree-fire-hazards of my early childhood).

When I was small, there would always come a day in the endless set of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas when my mom would pull out her big old Mixmaster.  She would announce that today we were going to bake cookies, and my sister’s and my eyes would light up with happiness. The first job was to mix up her renowned sour cream sugar cookies. That dough had to chill for what seemed like hours until it was stiff enough to roll out. So after the dough was deposited in the refrigerator and covered with a dish towel, we got to work making “Spritz” butter cookies. My sister and I, decked out in matching aprons made by our grandmother, traded off cracking the eggs, being careful not to massacre the shell or lose any of the unwanted egg white in the bowl of ingredients, lest our mother (the perfectionist) decide we were too young to be trusted with the job. We watched intently as she loaded the pastry tube with the yellow dough and perfectly pressed out wreaths and trees and poinsettias. If we promised to be neat, we got to carefully sprinkle the red and green sugars (no such thing as blue and purple and pink back then) on her creations, and press little cinnamon rounds where a wreath bow or tree star or poinsettia cyathium belonged. It was then that I decided that cinnamon was my absolute favorite flavor, and I probably snuck more than I planted in place.

Those delicious cookies baked quickly so we didn’t have to delay gratification too long to get the first yummy bite of Christmas. Then it would be lunch time, and after that we’d pepper her with constant teasing, “Is the dough ready yet?” until finally – finally – she’d declare it firm enough, and the real fun began. She’d get out her pastry cloth and flour it lightly, encase the old wooden rolling pin in its cloth, and deftly roll out the dough. My sister and I got to cut out the cookies – trees and stars and bells and Santas – and place them carefully on the cookie sheets, being mindful not to alter their shape with our small and sometimes clumsy hands. The best part was after they were baked, when mom mixed confectionary sugar, butter, and a little bit of milk into frosting. The privilege of frosting the cookies was always hers and she did it perfectly, carefully moving the frosting from the middle out to the edges, as neat as can be. Once the frosting was completed, she’d set it down and then my sister and I got to decorate again. This time, in addition to the red and green, we had yellow sugar and chocolate & multi-color “jimmies”, red cinnamon rounds, and silver balls to create our masterpieces. We still had to be neat about it. My mom was very particular – trees had to be green (though a little red as an accent was ok) and stars had to be yellow, and I guess she wasn’t fussy about the bells or Santas.

I still remember the first time I nervously frosted a cookie myself – I was probably about 12 or 13 – and I was determined that it would look as perfect as my mom’s beautiful creations.  

Mom’s cookies gradually developed a following outside of her immediate family. Everyone loved them and she never failed to deliver. When she was sick with cancer and the holidays were approaching, she made cookies on her better days and froze them so she’d have them when she wanted to start giving them away. After she passed away in January 2006, cleaning out her freezer, I uncovered a Tupperware container filled with bells and stars. I brought them home with me and put them in my freezer. Along with them came a couple of pie crusts and a cool whip container filled with her chicken stock. For almost five years, I dodged them as other things came and went in the freezer.

This year at Thanksgiving, with family coming for the first time for the holiday in New York, I needed to make room in the freezer for other items. Everything came under scrutiny. Out went the old frozen veggies and fruit that I hadn’t gotten around to using. Out went the boxes of Girl Scout thin mint cookies I bought years ago when my daughter still ate them. Out went the too-strong coffee from I can’t remember where or when. I checked out the container of chicken stock. Definitely time to ditch that. Out it went. Not too painful. I checked out the pie crusts. Freezer burned. Plus under the one that she definitely made, I discovered two “store-bought” crusts – bogus! Out they went. No tears shed.

The cookies were left. I argued with myself – these are FIVE YEARS old. You’ll make more. These can’t be any good. Stop being so sentimental. You’ll make more. You’ll make more. You’ll make more.

I stood there alone in my kitchen. Nobody else was around to urge me one way or another. I remembered walking into mom’s kitchen every other weekend during almost the entire last year of her life. Though she was usually lying on the couch in the living room when I arrived, exhausted from chemo and the effort to keep the house and everything going for my brother, the kitchen counter almost always held her large round Tupperware container filled with frosted, decorated sour cream cookies just for me because I loved them. Those cookies were an ongoing act of mother-love. The evidence sat on my shelf. They still connect me with her.

I put the cookies back in the freezer.