[Editor’s Note: This is the first of several personal essays we’ll be running this holiday season. Fifty people sent in essays this year for the Sebastopol Times Personal Essay Contest. We chose 13 of them, which we’ll run between now and January 4. Happy Holidays!]
By Sara Alexander
On the NPR radio news one recent morning, the Moscow Correspondent described what it would take to preserve a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine: “There would have to be Peacekeepers on site, which would require assembling a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ forces.”
I liked the idea of a “Coalition of the Willing,” which was a new phrase to my ears. While wondering who those “willing forces” might be, I realized that is what I want from Santa for Christmas: an end to the war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Gaza, and all the other wars in countries whose names I can barely remember.
I have dreamt of world peace since I was a mere 11 years old. I remember standing in the living room of our home in suburban Detroit and writing an anti-war poem that won me a dictionary with my name embossed in gold. When I was a freshman studying art at the University of Michigan in 1965, I started wondering what it was in human nature that made it so hard for us anti-Vietnam War protestors to get along with each other. Many years later I became a group and family therapist. I learned how to help people see and negotiate their (often quite extreme) differences. But I lost touch with my youthful outrage, my ambition to become a peace negotiator. These days I mostly just “fight the good fight” to manage my own smallish life, economic survival, and personal relationships.
I need to admit that I’ve given up doing anything meaningful about world peace, but I am willing to work myself silly baking at the holidays. What’s up with that?
I have an annual tradition of exhausting myself producing a rather spectacular (at least in my own opinion) assortment of favorite cookies: the ones I most like to eat and the ones my friends report that they like best. I pack them artfully in cellophane bags, which I tie with gaudy and preferably glittery ribbons, salvaged from multiple forays into multiple thrift-store holiday sales. I arrange them in adorable holiday themed tins, accumulated during those same forays. Then I deliver them to nearby friends and ship to loved ones far away. I manage to do this with a determination, fervor and physical stamina that I don’t quite understand.
For the first 40 years, I did this largely with one dear generous friend, Sandie B., a hard-working fellow therapist who also loves baking cookies and gifting them to friends and family. As we are getting older, getting all of the ingredients into the bowl and standing for hours in the kitchen has become much harder—much like hiking and stairs and remembering names has become harder. Our current production speed is about one third of what it once was.
So to complete this gathering, baking, wrapping and delivering marathon, I am now forced to assemble a “coalition of the willing.” I need many more days to get to the finish line, and I need more helpers.
Last year a plea on my neighborhood e-list scored a delightful and efficient young woman who was great fun to bake with and would not let me pay her in money, only in cookies. But then, much to my disappointment, she moved away. This year I got a little help from friends, but then wisely cajoled my housekeeper, Stella, into helping me bake one Sunday, which quickly extended into all of Monday. She is a great worker, and I loved getting to know her better, and she loved both the cookies and the contagion of the holiday spirit. By Tuesday, the cookies for those far away were in the mail. By Wednesday, I could barely talk, walk or stand.
Through this haze of exhaustion and my puzzlement at my own persistence, I enjoy the fact that, once again, I have managed to bake and assemble bags of fig-date anise swirls; apricot sage cornmeal cookies; Italian ricciarelli dotted with candied cherries; salted chocolate shortbread crusted in Demerara sugar; and my own variation on Pfefferneuse, infused with extra doses of seven spices and laced with a Campari sugar glaze, edible gold leaf and crushed pink peppercorns. The Pfefferneuse this year are almost too pretty to eat, and so delicious that I almost hate giving them away. I do like one with my morning coffee in these dark, dog days of winter.
I simply could not have done any of this without my ‘coalition of the willing’ helpers. I know that this won’t bring me, or anybody else, any bit closer to Peace on Earth. But I know it brings some joy to some people I know and love. And some to me.
