From the Oven

by Vance Briceland


In their first year of marriage they waited until Christmas Eve to bake the cookies. The dough recipe was Mel's, handed down from her mother and grandmother before her. Eric spent that pioneer evening mingling confectioner's sugar with milk and vanilla extract and food colorings, initially producing so thin an icing that it skimmed from the underside of the spoon in crazy dribbles, then overcompensating in sugar with a thick sludge that almost refused to be stirred, before at last mixing the blend smooth and pliant. The cookie cutters, stars and trees and stockings and something that looked vaguely like a lamb at rest, they had picked out just the night before.

Together they smiled that first Christmas Eve as Mel rolled out the chilly dough on the counter and as they pressed out thin shapes with the cutters and then gently slid them onto cookie sheets, gathering and sculpting the last scraps into an improvised wreath. While the cookies baked they smiled and brushed flour from each other's noses and held hands before the oven, peeking through the glass window and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could drizzle the sweet-smelling and brown-edged cookies with Eric's frostings of white, red, and green. The fir hung abundant with decorations, their presents to each other lay tightly wrapped and beribboned- it was their first Christmas together in a home of their own, and Mel and Eric had every reason to smile.

The next Christmas Eve they spent apart, Eric swilling egg nog at his parents' house, Mel shivering in the labor ward of the hospital. After her third false alarm the doctor had, they felt perversely, recommended the couple cease alarming the staff with their too-frequent comings and goings, and checked in a scowling Mel. "Spend the holidays in the hospital?" she complained while Eric draped limp green and red crepe paper around her door. And then, so not to sound too fretful, "Without you?"

They both wanted to be liked. While his parents munched slices of a fruitcake bought from a street-corner Santa, Eric that Christmas Eve sat with them before the TV set, privately glowering at a buxom country-western singer belting out another verse of "Silent Night." He and Mel had only spent one Christmas together, but this return home seemed too much a break with tradition. At last he muttered, "Cookies." His mother tossed a box of supermarket brand coconut macaroons in his direction, but by then he had risen to his feet with a scornful look and marched in the direction of the kitchen. Two songs later he peered back into the living room to announce, "You don't have any almond flavoring. Or cookie cutters."

"Why on earth should I?" his mother asked, her expression genuinely puzzled.

Mel woke early the next morning, her belly still making a tent of the bedclothes, to find her husband sitting in a chair beside her. Eric was beaming crazily and holding out a plate of Christmas cookies--stars he had carved with a knife. They were a bit charred on the bottom and ragged around the edges and rested blandly on the tongue, Mel thought, but considering everything, they were superbly iced.

In their third year together they began the cookies a full week before Christmas. Eric's supervisor had invited them both to an open house, and Mel thought a tray of freshly-baked cookies would appear the perfect gesture of holiday goodwill, especially with a round of promotions due the following month. Eric thought otherwise, but kept his doubts to himself as he dutifully decorated the stars and trees and the oddly-shaped lambs. Their daughter Amanda looked on from her high chair, occasionally enlivening the proceedings by gleefully toppling over bowls of colored sugar left too close to the table edge. Mel snapped two rolls of photographs that evening.

At the open house Mel felt lost and unnoticed in her tight black dress among the room of strangers; despite Eric's whispered advice to mingle, she found herself clutching her purse in an unsteady chair at the back end of the buffet table, slightly behind a decorated spruce tree. The cookies lay only an arm's-length away, her hostess having received the tray with a fixed smile when they arrived. Part of Mel's impulse to hide came from sheer embarrassment--what had she been thinking? She wished she had the nerve to spirit their offering away from the table. The buffet was lavishly catered with a spread of turkey and ham and trifles and even a plum pudding to be set afire later in the evening, and the cookies looked dull in comparison. Dull, but at least familiar. Mel was stuffing a lamb iced white with red horns into her mouth when her hostess crossed the carpet to loom above her. "Enjoying everything?" the woman asked. Guiltily Mel flicked away a crumb from the corner of her lips and nodded, desperately thinking up possible small talk. "You looked a little lonely over here. Aren't you feeling well?"

"Just worried about my daughter, I guess," Mel said.

"Oh of course, Eric said this was your first time with a sitter. The stories I could tell you--but I shouldn't." The woman paused and looked down at the half-eaten lamb protruding from Mel's fist. "You brought the cookies, didn't you? So thoughtful." As if humoring a child, or so it seemed to Mel, she reached for one of the stars and took a bite, her smile fading as she swallowed. "Why, did you make these yourself?" she exclaimed with more than politeness before taking another mouthful. "They're positively delicious. Mark, Mark--come taste Mrs. Mallison's cookies," she called to her husband, lifting the tray from the table and offering them to a cluster of guests.

"She'll give you the recipe," glowed Eric as he appeared from nowhere.

Eric didn't receive the January promotion, but, as he commented to Mel, it was merely a matter of time and opportunity. "Your cookies were a big hit at the open house," he said in speculation, but Mel merely wiped applesauce from Amanda's chin.

They began the cookies a full two weekends before Christmas that next year, Mel spending the mornings mixing up batches of dough to chill in the refrigerator. Evenings Eric assembled all their coffee cups and with food colorings created a spectrum of icings, over twelve shades altogether. While the radio played they feverishly decorated the baked cookies, their mouths set in grim concentration. Occasionally Mel would rise to whisk away completed batches to set in the freezer; Amanda watched their labors in silence.

Oversure of a promotion, Eric polished off too many eggnogs at the open house; Mel sat alone with crossed arms behind the decorated spruce and watched her husband cough in his hostess' face and brush a turkey drumstick down the arm of his supervisor's jacket. When later in the evening he backed his comely young secretary against a wall with one arm, she rose, marched to his side, and led him from the crowd. Their hostess caught up with them as they struggled into their coats in the den. "Don't forget your cookies," she said, gesturing at the waiter standing at the door who hauled the overflowing plastic tubs the pair had brought. "Sorry I forgot to have the caterers lay them out. I'm sure they're delicious."

"No more cookies. Never again," Mel scolded back at home. She threw the tubs whole into the wastecan and demanded that Eric carry the plastic bag to the curb immediately. As he walked down the front steps, she slammed the door behind him with a force that made his already sore head throb.

The next Christmas Eve they sat unspeaking before a compressed wood log dispiritedly burning in the fireplace. Their fir tree shimmered with garland and blinking lights in the front window; Amanda's fat stocking hung limply on a nail above them, waiting to be filled. From the radio drifted carols with which Eric occasionally hummed, but Mel pressed her mouth against their daughter's head and stared into the fire. Amanda twisted slightly to empty her box of animal crackers into her mother's lap, pausing only in her excited coos to offer them both a half-chewed giraffe.

They looked at each other. "She shouldn't have to settle for animal crackers at Christmas," Eric said tentatively.

"We do need a tradition, after all," Mel agreed, and the couple relaxed and smiled. Together into the kitchen they went, to grease the pans and heat the oven and show their daughter how to drizzle warm sugar cookies with icing from the underside of a spoon.

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