Christmas Begins - RemembeRED

This week’s RemembeRED prompt was to think of a sound or a smell that reminds you of something from your past and write a post about that memory.

I am positive I didn’t do my mom’s pumpkin bread justice with this post, but I had to write about it. Even now, it’s the smell of holidays and warmth and family for me. Pavlov should have ditched the bell and used a pan of my mom's pumpkin bread to show conditioned reflexes.  I get excited to buy a new pumpkin spice candle each year and can’t wait for the pumpkin spice lattes to hit the coffee shops. Despite having her recipe, it’s not the same unless she makes it, so I just wait for hers. Only nine more months…


Christmas Begins

Long before there were salmonella warnings, there were children leaning against their mothers in the kitchen, waiting to dip little fingers into some delicious, unbaked concoction that would later become a special treat.

I was one of those children.

Now, my mom isn’t the mom who always had fresh baked cookies on the table when we came home from school. She was more likely to be found cleaning the kitchen than baking in it, the scent of Murphy’s Oil Soap overtaking my senses as I walked in the door.

But when the weather turns cold, and Christmas carols begin to trickle onto the loudspeakers at department stores (which in my childhood didn’t happen until after Thanksgiving), my mother pulls out her baking shoes. Lying dormant the rest of the year, my mom’s baking genes come alive around the holidays, when she expertly crafts a few perfected recipes.

Every year, I fidgeted, waiting for my mom to open the canned pumpkin. Every year, I immediately poked my finger quickly into the bright orange mound and then quickly into my mouth, shocked each time that it wasn’t the sweet batter I remembered.

Calmly, she let my brother and I add ingredients to the mustard yellow Corelle mixing bowl, checking the blue and white recipe card, though she probably knew the measurements by heart.

Patiently, she folded in sugar and eggs and flour and spices, mixing it all with a hand mixer, making sure that my eager fingers didn’t find their way between the whirling metal beaters.

As the bright orange of the pumpkin darkened with the addition of flour and cinnamon and nutmeg, the familiar scent of Christmas flooded my senses. The slight bitterness of the pumpkin was coaxed into something warm, spicy, and sweet, a batter that promised to chase away the snow and cold.

With a practiced, steady hand, my mom poured thick batter into bread pans, sliding them into the preheated oven.

My brother and I were each handed a metal beater to lick clean, our little tongues wrapping around the metal to find every drop of the spiced, yet sugary, batter.

The warm smell of my mom’s pumpkin bread filled our house as she made loaf after loaf, allowing them to cool before wrapping them in aluminum foil to be stored the week or two until Christmas.

As the batter baked into bread in our brown oven, the Christmas season began.