Guest "post": Nightmares of Sugarplums

by Louise Kennedy Corrigan

A few years ago, I wrote about a family tradition that I particularly despised -- a breakfast pastry that only my mother considered edible. I still hate it, but because my mother died last year, somehow I can’t stop thinking about it this Christmas. I think this is how holidays work: They drive us crazy for years, and then the things that drove us crazy suddenly become the things we miss. Even though they still drive us crazy.

I'd write more, but I have to attend to another of my least favorite holiday traditions, which I apparently will also never shake. No matter how much I swear every year that this time I’m going to be totally organized and have everything wrapped a week ahead of time, it is now officially Christmas Eve and I have wrapped exactly zero presents. Then again, plain brown boxes are much more eco-friendly. And, with a little red marker and some silver duct tape, I’m sure they’ll be extremely festive.

In an equivalent spirit of "Hey, this counts as a present, doesn't it?" here's what I wrote about stollen:

The other day, I was flipping through a catalog of gourmet gifts when I came across a genuine German stollen, one of my least favorite foods of all time. I'm planning to order three.

For those of you who dwell in blissful ignorance, stollen is a leaden, log-shaped, Teutonic mutant form of breakfast pastry, heavy on the candied fruit and goopy-sweet white icing, not so strong on texture and taste. (The name, the German word for "post," is "in reference to shape," says my dictionary; I have other theories.) It's kind of a cross between a Danish and a fruitcake, only without the brandy to help you choke it down. It's also what my mother grew up eating on Christmas morning, so naturally it is what I and her other three children grew up eating on Christmas morning.

Or, more accurately, what we tried desperately to avoid eating. We sneaked it to the dogs. We crumbled it into bits and scattered them around our plates. We offered, lovingly, to share our portions with Mom. None of this worked, so as we grew older we resorted to reasoning with her.

The argument would usually kick off right after Halloween, when Mom would start figuring out the Christmas guest list and wondering aloud how many stollen to order from the Oakwood bakery, the only one in Dayton that prepared stollen to her exacting specifications. (I always wondered why she didn't just make it herself, but no doubt she, like the other bakers in town, couldn't precisely replicate the taste and feel of frosted cotton swabs.)

"Don't get the stollen this year, Mom," I'd argue. "Nobody really likes it. Why don't I make a coffee cake? Or we could just have some nice fresh fruit. Everybody likes fruit."

"You can have fruit any day," she'd say, reaching for the phone. "It wouldn't be Christmas without stollen."

"Ha," I'd say, which would not be a persuasive enough argument to keep yet another stollen from landing on our breakfast table, being sliced into alarmingly thick slabs, and falling in furtive crumbs toward the unenthusiastic dogs below.

Eventually, though, my parents moved from Dayton to Florida. Our first Christmas there, Mom searched in vain for an authentic stollen. Finally, she gave up. And as I sat at her table on Christmas morning, staring at my long-dreamed-of fresh fruit, I realized with a pang that she was right. It just wasn't Christmas without stollen. We all knew it. We hated it, but we had to have it.

I don't want to put too much metaphoric weight on a breakfast food, but it occurs to me that this kind of affectionate loathing lies at the heart of most traditions. Come on: Nobody eats candy corn or valentine hearts because they taste good. We eat them this year because we ate them last year. We will eat them next year because we are eating them now.

Same with stollen. It's nasty, but it's the same kind of nasty every Christmas. And, unlike fruitcake - whose peculiar place in the popular culture derives from this same weird formula - stollen is just obscure enough to render its devotees into a kind of extended family, a reluctant cult. By their candied fruits shall ye know them - and shall we know each other. At the tensest holiday moments, I can still make my sister laugh with just one word: "stollen."

Which is why I'm ordering three of them. One for each of my two far-flung brothers and one for the gang I'll be joining in New Hampshire: Mom, Dad, my sister and brother-in-law, and, most important, two young nieces who think the family's traditional Christmas breakfast is the worst idea since kippers. Already, they're begging their mother to skip the stollen.

How little they know.