Tis the Season!

This week is crunch time in my home. There is always so much to do at this time of year: decorating, shopping, watching Hallmark movies, and baking, one of my passions. Being passionate about the holidays brings back the best of years-gone-by memories. Each Christmas season, I search for my favorite holiday cookie recipes that have been part of our family's traditional Christmas event. So, this year, I take out my favorite recipe book, Christmas From the Heart of The Home, by Susan Branch. My son decided to bake with me this week and true to tradition, I pulled out Susan Branch's book and created several recipes that were my mother's favorites. 

 

Baking

by Phoebe Boswall

Smells of baking remind me of you.

Your red apron, my small striped one with the torn pocket.

Your soft stretched skin, fingers kneading dough

into a ball. My fat floury hands

grasped for your amber necklace,

Quick, Phoebe, the oven!

You played with flavors,

made little blogs of buttery dough on the tray

Your warm kitchen, my safe haven.

You taught me your language:

bicarbonate of soda, self-raising flour, vanilla extract,

milliliters of milk, grams of sugar:

caster, muscovado, granulated.

Now your apron hangs empty on the peg.

I wear it from time to time; mine with the torn pocket

doesn't fit anymore.

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Feeling nostalgic after baking a batch of one of my favorite holiday cookies, I decided to craft a golden shovel poem using the strike line: Smells of baking remind me of you.

Tis the season for sweet smells

to deliciously scent the hub of

my home. Each whiff of holiday baking

brings back sugary memories; remind

family of chocolate tastings, and me

recreating a long-seated passion of

baking with heart and following you.

©CV, 2019

🎄

Tomorrow, I will continue to bake and try my best not to be the messy baker I am in tribute of a loving artist, baker, and creative mother who offered her heart to all. 

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Now, it is time to join this week's Poetry Friday host Buffy Silverman, children's author and poet of nonfiction books. Buffy is bringing to the writing community her almost solstice edition of Poetry Friday that focuses on the wonder of Liz Garton Scanlon's new lyrical book, One Dark Bird.