One of the things I love to ask my students is what kinds of things they do with their families for holidays.

My students have taught me that many of their families wouldn’t dream of having Thanksgiving without a pan of chicken spaghetti on the table.

Now, we may have two kinds of potatoes and cornbread dressing and slices of cranberry sauce with the indentations from the can still visible on the sides … but we don’t have chicken spaghetti at my house.

What I’m saying is that I think a tradition tells us more about ourselves than we might realize. When Zack and I combined our households, we also combined our household traditions.

Thankfully, as single parents, we had kept those traditions very simple, mostly out of necessity.

Zack wanted wassail while we decorated the tree. The first iteration required cider full of red hots and cinnamon sticks, but finding red hots that didn’t carry a cross contamination warning for nuts proved to be difficult.

Our most recent batch included cinnamon discs, ground cinnamon, and some orange and lemon juice. (Y’all can steal that recipe for next year’s Wassail Fest if you want to.)

In my family, we traditionally have breakfast for dinner on Christmas Eve. That tradition was born of necessity; when I was young, scrambled eggs and breakfast were the only dishes my mom could manage to whip up after a day of gift-wrapping and kid-wrangling.

And we’ve added a few traditions of our own as well.

One is an ornament that’s meant to hold a photo. I never have gotten around to putting a real photo in it, though, so we just have the placeholder face in there. We rename her each year. This Christmas, her name is Mary Anne Skarkey.

One of my favorite traditions, though, is the gingersnap cookies Julia makes every year on the day we decorate the tree.

Honestly, I don’t know why they are called gingersnaps. Ours are chewy, not snappy. Maybe we aren’t cooking them quite long enough.

Maybe we are chilling them too long.

But honestly? I think that’s what makes them so good. They are buttery and chewy and in every way delicious.

Unfortunately, the cookbook we use for them, “King Arthur’s Baking Book,” gives dough assembly directions on one page and the list of ingredients a dozen or so pages later. Besides that, the spice additions that Julia has made over the past few years currently exist only in her head.

So this year, I promised Julia I’d write out directions for these, our favorite Christmas cookies.

NOT-SNAPPY GINGERSNAPS

(yields 10-12 dozen cookies but can be halved)

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups butter, room temperature (3 sticks)
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 cup dark unsulphured molasses
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
4-6 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 pinch ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Directions
■ Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugar together until mixture is light. Add vanilla, eggs, and molasses. Beat until fluffy.
■ In a separate mixing bowl, stir together dry ingredients (flour, soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg). Add dry ingredients all at once to the creamed butter mixture. Stir in dry ingredients just until no streaks of flour remain.
■ If possible, chill the dough several hours or overnight. When ready to bake, roll nickel-sized pieces of dough to balls. Roll each all in sugar. Placed on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Bake for 8-12 minutes.

Amelia Plair is a mom and high school teacher in Starkville. Email reaches her at [email protected].

Amelia Plair is a Starkville resident who writes occasional food columns.

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