Posted by amy at December 11th, 2007

Cate and Catherine
Cate with her namesake, my grandmother Catherine

Several months ago, Cate’s teacher asked if I would come in during the holiday season and talk about our family’s holiday traditions. She showed me the list of available dates, one of which was Cate’s birthday, so I grabbed that spot. Then I panicked. Holiday traditions? The only thing we really do annually is run up a huge credit card bill. I’m not sure kindergartners want to hear about our debate over interest rates -vs- cash flow issues. Then I remembered that for the past few years, we’ve brought holiday cookies to the neighbors. Perfect.

In addition to making a three tiered mermaid birthday cake, and throwing a mermaid themed birthday party for 20 six year olds, I managed to squeeze in several rounds of cookie making over the weekend. Yesterday, I assigned Dave the final task of making the gingerbread dough so it could chill, and I rolled out the cookies last night. The first two batches were a bit too thin and crispy for a 6 year old’s refined palate, so I rolled the second half much thicker, the men and women were puffy and soft, and quite yummy. I painstakingly hand painted each one with a glaze and then left them on their drying racks and went to bed.

And now, for the rest of the story …

I awoke to the sound of the fire alarm this morning, and then heard the heavy footsteps of my husband’s feet running up the stairs. He bursts through the bedroom door, and without even so much as a cup of coffee to cushion the blow he says:

Did you hear the one about the woman who put her laptop in the oven to keep it from getting stolen, then she turned on the oven and burnt the laptop?

My mind immediately went to precious Mac PowerBook G4 that was sitting on my desk when I went to bed. My Laptop? What did he do to my laptop? I’m going to kill him if he killed my laptop.

Well, I didn’t do that. But I did put your cookies in the oven last night to keep them from getting eaten by our resident mouse. And then I forgot about them, and turned on the oven this morning and, well, your cookies are toast.

My cookies! All that hard work! I came down and looked at the cookies, and realized that we are now even. He can no longer hold that ill fated kayak trip against me — the one where I flipped the boat and lost his gold plated fishing rod into the Atlantic Ocean. Payback is a bitch.