Listen to Brenda read her story
I knew all about Christmas cookies. In my house growing up, we cut out cookies shaped like reindeer, Santa Claus, and then best of all, gingerbread men. These we festooned with raisin eyes and buttons, then used frosting to write our names on them. They hung from the Christmas tree until they were too hard to eat, at which point we promptly took them down and tried and often failed to eat them. Fun times.
These cookies were all well and good. It’s not that I didn’t like them — I did. I can easily conjure up the memory of scents wafting out of the warm oven and the zingy taste of gingerbread on my tongue. I remember the thrill of poking a hole in a gingerbread man’s — make that gingerbread person’s — head just big enough to thread a ribbon through but not so large that it broke through the cookie. This was the pinnacle of cookie baking, I was sure.
Then I came to Germany.
In my early years here, I taught English. When December rolled along, I did what all teachers do: I figured I’d blow off the last class before the holidays by getting everyone to bring in Christmas cookies — or Plätzchen — for a small celebration with my students.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was essentially like challenging Olympic athletes to a race when…
