During the fall, Dad had taken us out to Uncle Keith’s timber to gather hazel nuts and walnuts. The job of us boys was to remove the walnut hulls with hammers and, after a drying period, we had to help Dad break the shell and pick the walnut meat out with nut picks. Boring! For several weeks I went to school with brown walnut stains on my hands. Then Mom could make nut cookies, balls of dough rolled in bits of black walnut. My favorite, so I could forgive the hours of slave labor I had put in.
Then there were liebkucken, made with ground figs and molasses, my least favorite. After the cookies were baked, they needed a period to age so they say on the table under dish towels until they could be measured on a geologist’s hardness scale. Amazingly, my Uncle Pat who is 95, still makes these cookies.
Decorating for Christmas was always fraught with interest. Aunt Katherine, who lived two doors down from us and across from Uncle Pat and Uncle Rudy, had an enclosed porch with lots of windows. Each year she let her kids and nieces and nephews use Bon Ami to create winter scenes. We made a white paste with the soap and dabbed it on the small panes making snow-covered pine trees, wreaths and snowflakes.