There’s a great series of giveaways going on over at Jolly Mom and Go Graham Go, two blogs that I follow regularly. I get three extra entries in all of their giveaways if I blog about a favorite Christmas memory, so here goes:

My Christmas memories are strongly linked with food, which is probably one big reason I struggle with my weight. But anyhoo, my mother was a baker (as are my grandmother and my sister; I, on the other hand, missed that gene). So during the month or so leading up to Christmas, our house was filled with the smells of Christmas cookies. I can remember a ton of varieties of cookies we ate every year: wreaths and candy canes, lacey crisps filled with chocolate, cut-out sugar cookies, almond sliced cookies, gingerbread men, powdered sugar fried ones, sour cream twists, pastries filled with cherries, and bar cookies galore. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, too. My mom was serious about her Christmas baking. Plus, she always made homemade cinnamon rolls and “sticky buns” for Christmas morning.

Anyway, my specific memory is of one of Mom’s last Christmases with us (it may have been THE last, I can’t honestly remember). She invited my sister’s good friends Todd and Heidi to come over for cookie baking day, and Jodi and Heidi helped Mom with a lot of the baking. Todd and I, being baking-challenged and kitchen-inept, were given some of the easier tasks, like icing the sugar cookies and decorating the gingerbread men. Then Mom decided to let Todd roll the chocolate macaroons into balls before baking. It’s a simple task, really; just roll the dough into balls, then roll the balls into powdered sugar and put them on the cookie sheet. But here’s the thing: among his many loveable quirks, Todd has a higher-than-average body temperature. So when he started rolling these cookies in his overly-hot hands, they turned to mush. He continued to try his best to roll those darn cookies, but eventually he was left with two hands completely coated in cookie dough, and no hope of forming recognizeable balls out of that mess. So he called for my mom, in a voice that was both apologetic and pitiful, and she came out to the dining room to find the chocolate mess that was Todd. She didn’t get mad; my mom was a sucker for a lost cause. She just helped him clean up and then sent him off to her bedroom to take a nap, since he was in desperate need of recovering from the sugar shock of the day and the stress of his cookie-balling attempts.

I loved that about my mom; she was a mom to everyone. I didn’t mind sharing her, because I knew she was a great mom and that other kids (and, in this case, fully grown men) deserved to have a chance at having a mom like her once in a while. I wish my own kids could have known her, but I hope some day they know me as one of those great moms. It all starts with making Christmas memories together.