Flour, Water, Salt, Wire and Paint

At around this time of the year, when we still lived in Egypt, mom would gather her kids around her with quantities of flour, water, salt, wire, and paint. We would fashion Christmas tree ornaments out of dough, and we would embed wire hangers in the less-than-well-finished (but oddly beautiful) shapes that resulted. My mother would then bake them. When the shapes came out of the oven, we would paint them.

We did this every year for several years. I remember the warmth and the beautiful smells of the kitchen as we made these ornaments and ate prodigious amounts of mom's astoundingly good made-from-scratch chocolate chip, oatmeal, and peanut butter cookies.

My mother loved those ornaments. She still had one or two of them when she died.

In memory of my mother, it is my goal to turn this practice into a family tradition at my house. All I have to do is figure out the exact proportions of the mix. I expect that our ornaments will be just as irregular as those ones were, and also just as beautiful. Every time I hang one on our tree, I will think of mom.