St. Nicholas Day Tradition

Day 54: Happy St. Nicholas Day! For me, the 6th of December marks the start of the holiday season. As a youngster, the occasion meant a visit from St. Nicholas...not Santa Claus, not Father Christmas, but a figure somewhere between the two, with a blush of St. Francis of Assisi thrown in for spice. I pictured St. Nicholas as physically resembling Father Christmas: tall, thin, heavily and luxuriously robed, bearded, and with a wreath of holly and mistletoe on his head. His companions were the forest creatures, chipmunks at his feet, birds on his shoulders, deer following adoringly behind as he made his evening rounds to the children of the world. He did not bring toys, clothes or the other trappings one would expect from Santa's bag. Instead, he brought sweets and fruit: mandarin oranges, chewy dates and figs, ribbon candy, crystallized maple sugar in the shape of leaves. I never knew which door he'd open, but it always seemed to be the one farthest from where I was waiting to hear the "thunk" of a sackful of goodies hitting the floor when he tossed it inside. And oddly enough, my father always seemed to miss the event, having excused himself to visit the kitchen or bath. Today, I celebrate St. Nicholas Day with a tradition I began in adulthood. To open the holidays, I bake one of my favourite cookies, either Spritz or Russian Tea Cakes. I think St. Nicholas would approve.

Cookie!

Day 52: The world is a pretty grim place right now, so I decided to get a tiny little head start on the holidays by making spritz. Normally, I wouldn't start my holiday baking until St. Nicholas' Day when spritz or sandies would kick off the season. However, I'd run myself out of cookies, and since I am the original Cookie Monster, I had a good excuse. There was just one hitch: margarine. The recipe calls for three sticks, leaving it up to the cook to decide whether they want to use butter, margarine. or a combination of the two. For decades...decades!...I've made spritz using one cube of margarine and two of butter. I seldom use margarine anywhere else, except in my chocolate chip cookies. And now, stick margarine has all but disappeared from grocery store shelves, with the exception of that branded Imperial.

I don't know what they put in Imperial, but a few months ago when I made my first batch of chocolate chip cookies using it, they flattened out to wafers with little chocolate mountains poking up. Not only were they flat, they didn't taste like they should have done. I tried to find another brand of stick margarine, and that's when I realized there was a problem. Apparently, no one is making it now. Several experiments later, I found that by adding almost a full cup extra of flour, they were at least edible. So why did I dive right into spritz without thinking about that?

I thought the dough looked and felt off in the mixer bowl, but when I tried to put it through the cookie press, it became obvious that it was just too gooey. I put it back on the mixer and added flour...roughly an additional 3/4 cup to the 4 cups specified in the recipe...until it reached the right consistency. Perhaps I could have added another 1/4 cup of sugar as well (I'll do that next time). Imperial margarine is a royal disaster.

Mathematical Shiny Objects

Day 154: Pi Day has come and gone. I acknowledged it with cookies because I am a non-believer. We're going to be paddling in the deep end today, so be sure to wear your bathing/thinking cap. Let's begin with a circle. Draw it on your computer, paint it on your floor, put pen to paper, just draw a circle and then fill it in with colour. When you finished the job, you should have been able to calculate exactly how much colour you'd used. But you can't. Because pi. Pi is an irrational number. To date, it has been calculated out to some billions of places and its fractional sequence still cannot be determined exactly; therefore, you cannot calculate how much colour you used to fill your circle. I don't care if you weigh the paint can or count the grains of graphite left in your pencil. You cannot know the exact amount of colour you used to fill your circle. Period. Well, that's a hell of a thing, ain't it? Science just did a whopping belly-flop in our mental swimming pool.

All my senses tell me that something is wrong here. Obviously, we have used finite amounts of colour to fill a well-defined area, and yet we cannot quantify it. The trouble originates with pi, or rather with an artificial construct without a precise value, as demanded by our system of mathematics. Aha! There, dear readers, is the elephant in the room which no one wants to talk about: our system of mathematics. Heaven forbid we should have to admit we've been wrong all along in how we calculate things.

I have said repeatedly that the human mind is still in a very early stage of evolution. One example of the primitiveness of our mental capacity would be that fiction as a form of entertainment was an unknown concept a mere thousand years ago. Oh, there were a few examples of it earlier (I could point out a major one, but would be risking the displeasure of the religious among you), but the mind of the average human could not grasp the "un-factualness" of a tale. Lying was understood, but using non-fact as an amusement was not. Likewise, the idea of geocentrism was eventually discarded when humans realized that the starry field above them was far more distant and moved in a manner which could not be explained by being centered upon the Earth.

Even today, we revert to beliefs when no other explanations afford themselves in a manner we can understand. Our mental incapacity hobbles us when trying to solve the cosmological constant problem, but we lean on it because we don't know how to look in another direction. We don't even know that another direction exists. Nor do we know how to look for the stability another system of mathematics might give to pi, one which allows us to know precisely how much colour fills our circle. In fact, we have been so distracted by the mathematical shiny object of calculating pi to its last decimal place that we aren't even bothering to look for a way to make the irrational rational.

Traditions

Day 59: Traditions are an important part of life, not only for the sense of bonding which they carry but also as something to anticipate with joy and hope. When one lives alone, the former is diminished by lack of connection, but there is no reason not to exploit the latter to its fullest benefit. As I have said before, I do not celebrate Christmas in the religious definition. I do put up a tree and I do exchange gifts with a small circle of friends, but my solemn observation is reserved for the Solstice. And without family to participate in Yuletide sing-alongs or elaborate Christmas dinners, I have had to create my own personal set of traditions, one of which is the making of spritz. I make them only at Christmastime, and not a single soul is here to reproach me for my lavish use of sprinkles. I've seen far too many cookies which appeared to have made the briefest pass through the coloured sugar, picking up only the few grains which allowed them to say, "Look! I'm festive!" Nope, in this household, you get sprinkles, lots of sprinkles to give that sugary crunch to rich almond-flavoured dough. Once a year is not such a sinful indulgence, is it?

Traditions

Day 55: Okay, call me a sappy sentimentalist if you will, but even though there's no one around to share them with me, there are certain traditions I observe in connection with the holidays. One of them is baking cookies on St. Nicholas Day, and it usually takes form as Spritz, those wonderfully almondy, butter-rich "cookie-press" cookies. I'm always rather heavy-handed with the sugar sparkles...cookies should be festive, don't you agree?...and in the days that follow, I will ration myself to no more than half a dozen each day in the interest of keeping my uniform trousers zippable.

Baking Day

Day 64: Is there a more homey fragrance than that of baked goods hot from the oven? The aromas of buttery spritz cookies and nutty "birdseed bread" fill my house on this cold December day. I got a little ahead of myself with this project. I don't usually start baking until St. Nicholas' Day, but the chill in the weather wanted something to cut through its bite, if only psychologically.

To my way of thinking, baking is a spiritually uplifting occupation. It is impossible to be downhearted when creating cookies, or dismal when handling bread dough. The golden warmth of crust and crumb brighten the kitchen and the soul. When the garden lacks gaily colored flowers, let the sideboard bloom with plates of spritz dipped in crystal sugar, festive and bright, and don't let Jack Frost put a damper on your cheer!