To the Holidays, Cheers!
We didn’t hang Christmas lights last weekend, and there’s nary a scent of holiday pine in our homes. Even the mantels are forsaken. No wooden nativity scenes warm their eaves.
Yet the Jankowski households are in full holiday spirit.
It all started last Tuesday, before the seasonal flurry of piecrusts and Christmas trees began. My sister, Anna, flew to Washington D.C. to spend Thanksgiving with her boyfriend. She arrived a tad homesick and teary eyed but quickly found her welcome—the perfectly baked pumpkin pie my parents and I had sent her from a local bakery.
Sunday morning, my parents greeted Anna’s return red-eye flight and whisked her home to a breakfast of golden, fluffy waffles. Meanwhile, across town, I stretched out of bed and turned on the oven. Not long after, my mom, in her kitchen, did the same.
Early evening, when Anna stopped by to tell me about her Thanksgiving, she also delivered some of mom’s fresh, orange-scented cranberry bread. I graciously accepted, and for a moment, I stopped spooning the nutty granola I’d made for Eli into Mason jars, to fill her empty hands. I gave her chocolate chip cookies just out of my oven.
Our first holiday weekend may have lacked the customary decorations, but what it missed in piney boughs, it made up for in good food—and the sharing of it.
