Today is the day before the day we celebrate over-indulgence and enter into the temptation of gluttony. I am doing my part today. I'm baking Old-fashioned Oatmeal cookies at the request of one of my granddaughters. She wants the ones I once baked from the Quaker Oatmeal box in the 1980's. Times have changed since then--and so has Quaker's recipe. I never wrote the recipe down and put it in my recipe file because I could always depend on Quaker's Oatmeal Box to have it printed there. Then they changed the recipes it had on the box. And I lost it forevermore.
Today I went to their website and discovered 63 recipes for Oatmeal cookies. I'm guessing that one of the recipes is the one I want and that it will satisfy my granddaughter's yearning for ones I baked twenty years ago. My dear husband is out gathering some of the ingredients as I type this post. I don't make many goodies for us these days. So my pantry is sorely lacking in "the makings" for cookies, pies or cakes. I'm also going to try a recipe for peanut-butter fudge that my mother-in-law gave me while she was visiting a couple of weeks ago. That will be my contribution to the Thanksgiving Feast. That and a bouquet of flowers from my garden.
It's sad in a way. For years I--the mom, the grama--was the center of the activity of Thanksgiving Dinner. Now I'm just a cookie maker. A fudge contributor. It's not because I can't prepare an entire meal for the twelve of us. That's a piece of cake for me today. It's just the way things have changed through the years. We have no traditions here at my home anymore. They are all at someone else's home.
My family has undergone enormous changes and reshaping the past few years. Some I'm so grateful for, others I could have omitted, had I been in charge.
Yet as I contemplate my cookies, fudge and flowers, I am pleased that I do have a contribution to make. Even if it is slight in the way I view Thanksgiving-Past. So while others scurry about the kitchen, peeling apples, chopping celery, mincing onions and stuffing eggs, I shall relax and sit and enjoy the chatter of their new-found joy of preparing a yearly feast. I shall devour the mixture of fragrances and be thankful for the time I have to spend playing with my grandchildren and great-grandson. I shall wait upon my husband and make this a day of blessing for him. And I shall thank God for the opportunity to praise Him for the blessings of family and eternal life with them when He sets the table in His Kingdom above. selahV
[copyrighted, selahV today, 2007]
