SusieJ's Advent Calendar: December 13, 2007

The recipe: Vanillebrezeln

Vanilla has much more depth of flavor than the pejorative use of the word would suggest. Vanilla pretzels are a delicious and easy to bake way to showcase that flavor. These are a good cookie to make with children that enjoy rolling playdough and shaping it.

The surprise: Origins of a bittersweet song

The song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", first sung by Judy Garland and made famous by Frank Sinatra, is a bittersweet little song that ends on a note of hope.

Artificial trees: the 3-D puzzle

Since elementary school, it has been my job to decorate the tree. My mother has insisted for years she only had a tree for me, and later for my stepfather. I don't believe her because the year I moved out, she bought an evergreen shrub in a pot, and I decorated that.

In the years before I could convince her to buy a real tree, assembling the tree was also my job. At the start of December we would pull out a large cardboard box of ornaments and other decorations. A week before Christmas Day, we would pull out the even larger box holding the tree.

In the 70s, all trees were bottle-brush trees. Each "branch" divided into three smaller branches (and ended in a bottle brush). At the opposite end, the bare end was tipped with a tiny dot of paint to indicate its size and position in the hierarchy of the tree. This resembled a tree only slightly more than the stacked triangle trees kindergarteners draw.

The first step was to sort the branches by size. The sizing dots were so small, faded and chipped, it was nearly impossible to distinguish one color from the other. Of course, the peach branches were just above the orange branches, and just below the pink branches. At least a quarter of the branches needed manual comparison to determine the correct position, and even then there were moments of realizing one pile had seven branches, not five!

All this time I'm grabbing armfuls of branches out of the box, shoving branches into the base through other branches, bending them to be more "realistic" and the simple things itched. Maybe it was the dust or small scratches from the stiff plastic needles, but I felt like I was allergic to that tree!