SOAPBOX: Pink star cookies
Download mp3 (5.21 MB)On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. For winter 2022, writers tackled the theme EATING CHRISTMAS.
The dining hall bustled with clattering silverware and lunchtime conversation, but Annabelle and I were silent, staring at our salads. I speared a piece of broccoli and glanced up at my kid. She hadn’t touched her food. She looked like she might burst into tears. Or bolt.
“You’re not hungry?” I asked. “You didn’t eat breakfast.”
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she said in the voice of a person just barely holding it together.
I get it. Thirty-five years earlier — on a similar late August afternoon, on the brink of my own freshman year of college, I puked up a grilled chicken sandwich from the Carl’s Jr. drive-thru in Blythe, California — the halfway point between Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Nerves run in the family.
Annabelle is the prettier, fitter, smarter, kinder, more creative version of me — but she’s still me, the anxious first born: eager to achieve, a little socially awkward, terrified of change.
With just a few hours to go before the “big goodbye” looming on the orientation schedule, I’d sent my husband and our younger daughter off to explore Portland while I tried to calm her down.
So far, nothing had worked. We’d filled three carts at Target, covered the walls of her dorm room with tiny white lights and photos, attended all the orientation events. She’d met — and liked! — her roommate, and she even took my advice to smile and look people in the eye as we walked around the campus.
But still, sitting in the middle of that dining hall, I was pretty sure that Annabelle was about to projectile vomit across the table, a technique she’d perfected as a colicky infant.
I was feeling pretty nauseous myself.
“Annabelle, what can I do?” I asked. “How about a care package? What can I send you? Anything. Just tell me something that would make you happy.”
“Pink star cookies,” she said — so softly I had to ask her to repeat herself.
Pink star cookies?
Whoa. Annabelle knows the Silverman Stern family holiday rules better than anyone. In mid-November each year, I make a dozen batches of the same sugar cookie dough recipe I’ve been using for decades. I freeze it till the week before Christmas, when I make about a bazillion cookies — always pink stars, dating back to a time when I owned only one cookie cutter — to serve at parties and box up for family and friends.
Pink stars? In August?
In our house, we don’t turn on Christmas music or watch a holiday movie (even “Elf”) till the day after Thanksgiving. We have Chinese food on Christmas Eve, Irish soda bread on Christmas morning and my mother-in-law’s stuffing for Christmas dinner.
But we weren’t in our house. We were in a dining hall 1,200 miles away, and this was Annabelle’s new home. The rules were changing. Everything about life that I’d taken for granted for the last 18 years was changing. Annabelle already knew what I was just beginning to understand.
Later that afternoon, we said our goodbyes. Back in Phoenix the next day, I dug out my recipe and my cookie cutter and made a single batch of sugar cookie dough. By the time the care package got to Oregon, Annabelle was happily settled into her new life. She didn’t need pink stars.
But I needed to send them.
