Adventures in Merry Making
Welcome to this week’s issue of The Jumpstack! This week, we CHRISTMAS. Let’s jump in!
Cookie Monsters
The Great Baking is upon us. Be it school bake sales, company potlucks, or any variety of holiday party, we’ve all been roped into preparing goods for people who are not our immediate family.
While a seemingly simple task, the road to a successful contribution (an empty container at the end) is filled with unseen peril. But fear not! I am a veteran of the Great Baking—and, like Virgil, I shall guide you through with practical tips so that you do not find yourself stuck in a lower level of baking hell.
1. Know what you’re getting into. A few dozen sugar cookies sounds like something you could get done in an hour or two, right? WRONG. This is a multi-day enterprise, my friend. You need to let that dough chill overnight. You have to let those cookies fully cool before you put icing on them. You have to let the icing set on those cookies before putting them into your festive Tupperware. Sugar cookies are an exercise in strategy, endurance, and time management. Before you sign up for a specific item, make sure to give the recipe a good look so you’re not in the kitchen at 3 a.m., crying as you put smiles on snowmen.
2. Do as you’re asked to. This is the number one rule that trips up newbies to the Great Baking every year. You decide you’re not going to just make sugar cookies, you’re going to make the most unexpected, amazing sugar cookie-based confection that will have the other parents weeping at their own mediocrity and the principal begging you to lead the PTA, but you’ll have to decline because you’re now a judge on The Great Canadian Baking Show.
This is a terrible idea.
You’ve been asked to make something specific because it works and people will eat it. You’ve been asked to make/package/deliver it in a certain way because that works with the system already in place. And your fantastic, complicated innovation? Someone already attempted that, and it all ended in tears. People are relying not on your whimsy and creativity, but your basic competency in following instructions. Stick to what you’ve been asked to do: the people in charge will be more than overjoyed that you did.
3. Make more than required. You’re gonna mess up. You’re going to forget about that hot spot in your oven. You’re going to break a few cookies. Your family will eat a percentage of your bakestuffs, regardless of consequences. Making an additional half-batch is risk management: why do you think there’s such a thing as a baker’s dozen? You think you’re better than bakers? Get outta here.
4. Wear a t-shirt. Go ahead, ignore my advice, trust your sleeves. When your hands are covered in dough, and your cuffs are dipping into the bowl and you’re completely helpless, don’t come crying to me.
5. Accept imperfection. If you’ve followed all the previous rules, you’re probably fine. Don’t obsess over your wobbly icing skills or that you won’t be invited to The Great Canadian Baking Show for it: if they had wanted perfection, they would’ve hired catering. You’ve done this for free, so it’s their problem now! You are released from the Great Baking for this year.
What are my trusted cookie recipes? This Sugar Cookie recipe is a no-brainer, and everyone always loves these Chocolate Chip Cookies. Note: these are not “healthy cookies”, they both have real butter and sugar in them, so they are delicious cookies. Enjoy!
Table Manners
We’ve got a table hockey set waiting under the tree this year—yes, the one from Costco.
Table hockey, like ping-pong or crokinole or horseshoes, is one of the official games of the holidays that you play with your extended family (and strangers who claim to be family) as you wait for dinner to be ready.
Inoffensive and requiring just enough dexterity to make it interesting, providing substance for small-talk and camaraderie—and the fact that you can drink between turns—makes it the perfect way to pass the time. But did you know the festive backstory behind the game?
With the story of table hockey’s history, and its Toronto origin, here’s Lance Hornby:
In 1932, with no money for family Christmas gifts, the elder Munro cobbled together a game from spare wood, clothespins, butcher’s wire and drawer knobs from Aikenhead Hardware. A Scottish-born proprietor of a fish and chip store, he chose to make a hockey game rather than football, enlisting some female members of the clan to make the first goal mesh by sewing fine fish nets onto tiny posts. His creation was a kind of two-sided pinball, with levers to move three players with the right hand and a goalie with the left.
By 1971, table hockey was an international sensation, and CBC aired this hilarious segment on the 2nd Annual World Table Hockey Championship in New York City, where everyone is simultaneously taking things very seriously and not seriously at all:
“The T.J. Rudd Trophy, by the way, is older than the Stanley Cup… it was picked up in a Third Avenue antique shop, and we’re told it dates back to the Peloponnesian War.”
Double sauce, please
Chinese food, be it homemade, delivery, or in the restaurant itself, has always been part of my holidays, and I’m not unique in that regard:
This lovely 16-minute documentary goes behind the scenes of King Wok in Kitchener, where a family takes on their annual gargantuan task of feeding Canadians hundreds of pounds of chicken balls. And they do it with humour, patience, and profound love for each other. The film lingers on the dishes long enough to make your mouth water, so beware watching on an empty stomach: you’re liable to change your dinner plans.
Thanks, but no thanks
I loathe returning gifts above all else, and will hold onto them guiltily, rather than go through the process of returning them in-store. But online is a different matter: the experience is so quick and efficient that I don’t fear it.
This article by Davy Alba explains what happens when you send that gift back:
Rejected gifts and returned goods don’t go back on the shelves from which they came. They follow an entirely different logistical path, a weird mirror image of the supply chain that brings the goods we actually want to our doors.
Like Old Joe appraising Scrooge’s bed curtains, the resellers are more than happy to profit from your unwise choices, and as online shopping grows popular with each passing year, their economy from disappointment flourishes.
Queen of Christmas
Every year, Mariah Carey reminds us that she won the holidays years ago with one song that sends millions into her bank accounts every December. She reclines in thick furs and sips hot tea as she watches us mere mortals scramble, and she laughs, refusing to pity us.
You cannot avoid her song when you venture outside, nor the reminder that she gets paid every time you hear it. She can blitz the networks with appearances, or none at all. Mariah Carey puts exactly as much effort as she feels like into Christmas each year, and still comes out ahead: a role model to us all.
So, to end this Jumpstack, enjoy this snippet from Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” As Written by Walt Whitman:
I do not require to hang my stocking
Thereupon the fireplace
My hair, my tongue, every atom in my body form’d from this air
feeds the Yuletide fire
and the very spread of my thighs proclaims noel.
That’s it for The Jumpstack this week! if you liked it, why not hit that heart down there, or sign up to get it slid directly into your inbox, for free? And next week, we’ll do one more smoke break with your work wife for 2019.