To drop for a moment the small amount of character persona I cultivate here, let me begin with some background for this completion.

For over fifteen years now, the only surviving members of my father's family have been my father, his two brothers, their spouses, and myself. My father and his brothers are nostalgic old Hungarian men of relative economic comfort; the only thing they ever really speak of wanting at the holidays that they couldn't buy themselves is their mother's and their grandmother's cooking. So, back when I was poor and in college, I took it upon myself to try recreating various holiday cookie recipes I vaguely remembered from when my grandmother was alive and well. I didn't have the budget for the organic ingredients that would more closely resemble what had been available in their time, I didn't know anything about butter and baking chemistry, and I didn't have many translated recipes to try. And as years passed, my own diet changed for personal and health reasons to something best described as 'vegan with cheese', so now I can't even eat more than a taste test of the holiday baking without making myself ill. It's something I don't need, and something I always give away.

Because of this task, this year I decided to go all out. According to the clock on the coffee maker, I spent about fifteen hours baking over the course of three days. In the interest of following family recipes as they were available sixty, eighty years ago when first written down and translated, some just now finally tracked down in cookbooks or on the internet, I used only local and/or organic ingredients where possible, down to buying organic almonds and blanching and peeling and grinding them for hours instead of picking up dried-out slivers of them from the baking aisle at the standard grocery.

It started out as a very fulfilling experience. Peeling almonds became a meditative task, one in which I honestly felt some kinship with my ancestors. I began to understand the long hours they put in every single year, or, in fact, every single day before the invention of conveniences of shopping and cooking that I so took for granted. And yet, by the end of the baking stage, I was sick to death of cooking. I began resenting my family who I swore would scarf them down with no knowledge of the amount of work I normally put in for them and did especially this year.

And then, when we finally got together for winter holidays over a month late (with the cookies taking up much space in my freezer) and just long enough after the baking for me to forget on some level just how much it sucked, the unusually positive response near made me cry. They did, in fact, notice the difference, even if they didn't know just how much more money and time and effort it took. The tin left out for everyone for the day disappeared quickly, and everyone taped their own shut tightly and squirreled them away for safekeeping. The palacsinta (Hungarian crepes, with very family-specific fillings) that I made in the morning from five different internet recipes, several meals' worth of practice crepes, and several phone calls to my parents, had sixty-year-old men bouncing happily like excited children (sadly not pictured).

In the month-long delay between baking and gifting, all the work had become worth it. I don't know if I'll go this far ever again, or how much I'll make each year from here on out, slaving in the kitchen wearing my grandmother's silly little crocheted apron for nostalgia's sake, but the task spurred me to do something for other people above and beyond what I would have done on my own. And if I may say so myself, the few bites here and there I could have without getting ill were, in fact, amazing.

Day One: recipes, almond crescents, and kolache

Day two: rasberry kolache, sugar cookie dough

Day three: ginger snaps, sugar cookies

Day thirty or so: Delayed Wintermas

Win.