R.I.P. Christmas Cookie

When presented with a be-sprinkled cookie a little girl may marvel at how tiny they are or admire the rainbow of color. She may try to separate them into small piles in order to determine exactly how many different colors there are. Or see if she could crunch just one between her teeth.

A boy probably wouldn’t do any of these things. Not for very long anyway. My BoBeans didn’t get past the word “ball.” There, on top of his cookie, were tiny balls. And what do little boys do with balls? They throw them. He tried, rather unsuccessfully, to throw them each individually. He looked to his right and said, “Catch!” to his Uncle Bob.

That didn’t work so well. It is hard to follow the trajectory of a sprinkle. So he resorted to flicking them all over. By the time my son was done mutilating the once beautiful Christmas cookie it looked as though the area around his booster seat was the Christmas Cookie Topping Burial Ground. The little guy was also nicely decked out in what appeared to be chocolate colored war paint.

We had a small Christmas gathering yesterday with a couple of our close and dear friends. Besides an abundance of cookies there was a smattering of other good and comforting foods along with coffee, tea, and eggnog.

When my son wasn’t mauling cookies he would pluck various other items off of a tray to sample. He would wander around nibbling a cracker for a little while and then decide he no longer wanted it, so he would replace the remnants to the exact spot on the tray from whence it came. There would be a row of agreeably placed crackers at the end of which was placed, ever so precisely, the aforesaid sculpted cracker.

They were so tastefully gnawed that they reminded me of modern art. I should have saved them to sell on Ebay. People have paid copious amounts of money to attain stranger things than chiseled party food.