The Holiday Spirit
This time of year is ripe for sparking inspiration about recipes to collect
This year-end holiday season is such a rich time of traditions and gatherings. It’s a fabulous opportunity to be alert to the dishes that we count on seeing, that bring comfort with their familiarity and provide a sense of connection across the years and generations. With feast-like dinners, brunches, cocktail parties, holiday open houses, neighborhood cookie-exchanges—we get an enticing array dishes, moods, styles in the potential recipe mix too.
During this last week of the year, and reflecting back on meals and gatherings of the past few weeks, think about what dishes you’ve been served that mean the most to you, the ones with which you feel the greatest connection. If those recipes aren’t already in your collection, now is the perfect time to make a point of getting them from family and friends while the inspiration is fresh.
Better yet: don’t just ask them for the recipe, ask them about the recipe. How long have they been making it? Who did they get it from? What particular memories or associations does that recipe have for them? Posing questions like these sparks understanding of the story behind the recipe, as valuable to capture as are the ingredients and method for making it.
And knowing how many really wonderful conversations I’ve had with so many people when I bring up the idea of our recipe boxes and collections of favorite recipes, I recommend adding that theme to the conversational mix. It’s a great way to learn some new things about folks you may have known for many years, and a fabulous way to connect with new acquaintances too. Only on the rarest of occasions will the subject not spark an interesting discussion.
The Flip Side
This isn’t news to anyone else who treasures these old recipe collections. Half the fun of recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers is seeing what else is on those pages. We can revel in the styles of cars and prices of food in advertisements, maybe it’s a snippet of “society page” coverage or general news of the era. And it’d shock younger generations to hear that once upon a time, we had so few television channels available that the schedule could be printed in the paper each day. For some of my work projects, I spend a lot of time looking back in newspaper archives doing research and can get totally (and delightfully) lost in looking at other content among those pages.
A Note to Self for Next Year
It’s not much surprise that I’ve been digging into my mom’s tattered recipe folder more often in recent months, as I’ve been delving deeper into this idea of preserving cherished recipes and working to learn more about my own family’s story on that subject. I seriously need to figure out a way to reinforce that poor thing a bit, afraid it’s going to truly fall apart one of these days.
Even in previous years, it was hard to pull the folder out, go to the specific section in search of a particular recipe, and leave it at that. Invariably, I’d go ahead and carefully go through every other recipe in that section…for the simple pleasure of nostalgia and comfort that gets stirred up as I do.
As I did recently, on occasion I’ll commit to walking through the whole thing, from front to back. Very gingerly lifting out all the recipes from a section and paging through them one by one. On this last trip through the collection, I was reminded of this gingerbread house we made in 1981 (thanks, Mom, for so clearly noting the date!). Wish I had a picture of how ours turned out, I have only the vaguest memory of making this. But now I feel compelled to put it on my list for next year, also with thanks to Mom for having kept the template for cutting out the cookie pieces. It’ll be a joy to have my big sister over to work on that together. And reminisce about holiday traditions and toast to our mom as we do.
Wishing everyone the very happiest of holidays and here’s to a fabulous start to 2025. May it be a year rich with the delight of cherished recipes and the comfort, joy, and connection that they provide.