I love Christmas. I love the lights, the candles, bells, the Messiah performed all over town. I love getting a pinon tree from the people down on Griegos Street who get evergreens from Mora. I love deciding whether to use the little ornaments we’ve collected over time or the bigger red (plastic now) balls and stars. I love cooking traditional treats.

But this year I have a dilemma. How can I do some Christmas cooking and baking without gaining ten pounds like I did last year? So far all I can come up with is to not make any sweets. This would be hard to do when I think about my mom making cookies during December for us to enjoy all during the holidays, and when one way I remember my mom is to make the food she made. I could bake cookies and give them away, but then I think of the years it seemed everyone baked and exchanged dishes of cookies until we couldn’t even look at them anymore. It is not easy to not eat cookies when I realize that, like mine, most of the treats are from old family recipes made once a year with special meaning for the baker. It’s also more difficult to consume platters of treats because we don’t have a lot of young people around who like to eat sweets. And now there are even people who don’t eat sugar!

Maybe baking platters of cookies has gone the way of big families, large, extended-family dinners, and repeated gatherings through the holidays. It feels a little sad, but then I think of what I’ve learned about making new traditions based on my values. Being thoughtful about how I want to celebrate Christmas rather than just doing it by rote is really more fun. So this cookie dilemma is an opportunity to stop and think about what I really want to do.

For me holidays are about family and eating together. Cookies aren’t even a key part of it. I guess I can focus on our gathering instead of the food itself. (That’ll be a change.) Besides, making cookies “for other people” is really a way I try to kid myself, like when I buy ice cream “for Jim.” Maybe I can have the celebration part of Christmas without the cookies and without the extra weight. I can still fix dinners, and I can still think about my mom and how special she made all the Christmas holiday meals for us. She’ll still be at my shoulder when I make frittatas and breaded cauliflower and pasta con sarde.

What is important to you about the holidays? What values do you want to express? How can you have what you want and not what you don’t want? How can you make it your holiday, and let everyone else have their holiday? The last thing I want to do is to cause anyone any stress about the holidays. And especially me! So I’m going to focus on the things that are important to me, and remember my mom and dad through being together, raising a glass of wine, and preparing  something besides cookies, as Mom always said, “with love.”