Does your family have a special Holiday dish that someone is known for? The kind of Christmas treat that everyone looks forward to receiving each year? Christmas cookies, candies, cakes, or confections that have become a family tradition?
When I was a kid, growing up in our household meant enjoying my Mom s baking, especially this time of year. She was famous among family and friends for her pie baking prowess, nailing the crust, of course, as any pie baker worth their salt will do.
Brian Stephenson
My Mom s cookies - especially holiday versions - were popular too. Candy Cane Sugar Cookies and fudge were perhaps her best-loved and most-consumed in her repertoire. I ve always been great at EATING the baked goods I m just not skilled in baking them! That s where my wife saves the day.
By Murr Brewster Correspondent
In your standard Christmas story, there is a family fruitcake that makes the rounds every year and doubles as a doorstop until it is mailed to the next victim. The tradition is easy enough to maintain, since it doesn’t involve any real work, other than annual retrieval and a trip to the post office. Certainly nobody is expected to eat it.
Our family bucked the tradition. We ate it. But then again, ours was not a fruitcake. It was an honest-to-goodness plum pudding, and it thudded onto our porch every December courtesy of Great-Aunt Gertrude. This was the real thing: an authentic antique confection produced with love, or at least a sense of obligation, by an authentically antique woman. Great-Aunt Gertrude was born in 1869, which is remarkable enough, but her holiday treat was positively medieval.
Yves here. Reader IM Doc, an internal medicine practitioner of 30 years, trained and worked in one of the top teaching hospitals in the US for most of his career before moving to a rural hospital in an affluent pocket of Flyover. He has been giving commentary from the front lines of the pandemic. Along with current and former colleagues, he is troubled by the PR-flier-level information presented to the public about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, at least prior to the release of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Pfizer vaccine: Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine. However, he did not find the study to be reassuring. He has taken the trouble of writing up his reservations after discussing the article with his group of nine physicians that meets regularly to sanity check concerns and discuss the impact that articles will have on their practices.