the dork days of christmas.

Listening to: Ice Dance by Danny Elfman (from The Edward Scissorhands soundtrack)

Line obsession: Somewhere, things must be beautiful and vivid. Somewhere else, life has to be beautiful and vivid and rich. Not like this muted palette - a pale blue bedroom, washed out sunny sky, dull green yellow brown of the fields. Here I know every twist of every road, every blade of grass, every face in this town, and I am suffocating. - From A Map of the Known World by Lisa Ann Sandell {Scholastic, 2009}

Christmas transforms me. If you saw me, you would not realize the depth of the transformation. For the duration of the holiday season, I seem normal.* I wear normal clothes. I carry on with a fairly predictable routine. But on the inside, I'm like a tacky Christmas sweater. I am a Christmas dork. It's so bad. Christmas is my favorite holiday and I embrace all of it. I love the sweet, bright, candlelight parts everybody loves. But I also like the tacky tinsel parts. The commercialized part makes me laugh, not rant. Even all the cranky shoppers don't get me rattled. I laugh at them, not with them. I wish Christmas lasted all year long.

Last year, I came [----] that close to buying one of those Rudolph car kits for my car. Do you know what I'm talking about? The red plush nose goes on the front of your car. The antlers attach to the windows. I'm smiling so much just thinking about it. Sarah talked me out of it. Deep in my heart of hearts, I know she's right. Still. Everytime I go in Walgreens, I pick up the kit, cradle it close to my heart, and imagine how adorable my Civic would look with reindeer gear. But the car kit is only the beginning. Further proof of my holiday dorkdom includes:

- My obsession with specific Christmas CD's. I'll write more about this later on.

- The Christmas Honks. This tradition gets its own post. I hope you will embrace it too.

- Christmas movies. There are certain movies I watch every year.** Most people do that, I think. That's acceptable. But I also like the uber-corny movies that come on during the Christmas season. One year I rented a movie called ... wait for it ... "Mary Christmas." John Schneider, my lifelong crush, was the romantic lead. The movie was, uh, not so great. Who knew? :) I realize I just wrote about Travis Tritt videos and how they're too silly dramatic. Very often, made for TV Christmas movies are like the Travis Tritt videos except with Christmas trees. I don't know why I justify one over the other, but I do. (A note: my least favorite Christmas song, The Christmas Shoes, was made into a movie. I do not watch that one.)

- Baking. I'm not very good at it, but I channel Ina Gartan around the holidays and pretend I know what I'm doing.

So I thought it would be fun to kick off the holiday season here on the blog with one of my favorite cookie recipes. There's a sweet story behind the recipe too, which makes it that much better :)

The first job I had after graduating from college was in student ministry. My pastor, Gene, and his wife, Harriet, took me to lunch a few weeks after college ended and asked me if I would consider interning for the summer. My immediate reaction was: not a chance. I'm not a natural pick for a student ministry position. SM people tend to be very outgoing, very cool, very hip, and very other things I am not. Still, Gene and Harriet were convinced I could handle it. I decided to do it for one summer. I ended up working there for three years.:) I think the experience was great because the teens were so incredible. They were sweet, hilarious, and they weren't afraid to ask hard questions. (Which reminded me that it's okay to ask hard questions. And that sometimes I have to try and make peace with the questions I don't get answered.) I came home from college feeling like a momentous loser. Being around such genuine people helped me come back to life a little bit.

I met with Gene and Harriet every week to talk about work, ideas for events, life in general. And very often, Harriet would make these amazing cookies I'm about to share with you.

Here are a few more reasons I love this recipe:

1.) It is way easy. I turned the oven into a smoke pit when I tried to make them earlier this week, but that's because my oven conspires against me. It's hard to mess these up. My favorite cookie recipe is for chocolate chip cookies (it's Tyler Florence's recipe from the Food Network) but that one takes a sleigh full of ingredients and quite a bit of time. Plus you have to mix things in order. With these cookies, you can dump everything in at once.***

2.) They're so bright and pretty. They look like confetti cookies. One year I put them in a clear goodie bags, then tied the bags with hot pink ribbons (because pink is so neglected at Christmas), and gave them as gifts. Super cute.

3.) They make the whole kitchen smell delicious. Cake batter + Fruity Pebbles = divine. Unless your oven conspires against you. In which case it will just smell like you're having a birthday party in an ashtray.

4.) The cookie dough is so good. If you're the type of person who likes cookie dough more than the actual cookie, these will rock your world. Salmonella whaaaaat.

Here are the only two tips I've learned in baking these little piles of awesome:

Tip the First: This recipe makes a big batch, but they taste better if you bake them all at once. I tried to refrigerate half the dough over night, and the Fruity Pebbles got stale. The cookies still tasted okay, but they're better if you bake them pronto.

Tip the Second: After you spoon them out onto your cookie sheet, push down on them a little bit. The dough is pretty stiff so the cookies don't flatten much. They don't flatten for me, at least.

Here's the recipe:

Harriet's Amazing Fruity Pebble Cookies

Ingredients:
1 box of yellow cake mix
1/2 cup of oil
1/4 cup of water
1 egg
3 cups of Fruity Pebbles cereal

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350. Mix together cake mix, oil, water, egg, Fruity Pebbles. Drop by spoonfulls onto cookie sheet and bake for 11 minutes. Yields about 2 dozen.

* Harriet says they're also delicious with cocoa pebbles.

And they come out pretty, delicious, and ready to be consumed :) The best part is that every time I make them, I think of Gene and Harriet. I wish you could meet those two. They're both retired now, but they're still up to being their cool, genuine selves. (Gene makes mandolins. How awesome is that?) I'm grateful for their friendship. Having friends who believe in you when you don't believe in yourself even a little bitty bit is an incredible thing.

If you have a great recipe, I hope you'll share it in the comments. It doesn't have to be a cookie recipe. Just something you like to bake around the holidays. I don't want you to miss some of the fabulous sounding recipes already popping up : On Monday's post, Ashley left a recipe for stroopwaffles with ice cream and a Europen dessert called "doukissa cake." They both sound awesome. I'm going to Google "doukissa cake" as soon as I stop typing. Nothing says fun like converting European measurements. On Friday's post, Steffanie left a recipe for Monkey Bread that made my mouth water. (No monkeys are harmed in the making of the bread. ;)

In completely unrelated news, I'm off to see New Moon with my best friends this weekend. I'm hoping by the time we go (Sunday, to a matinee) we will miss all the screamers. And I'm not judging you if you're a screamer. I love passionate fanbases. I'm always in line for Harry Potter at the midnight showing. I'm just old and boring and screaming makes me want to throw whatever candy I happen to be sneaking in. I thought the first movie was silly. We had fun watching it for all the wrong reasons. I'm thinking this one will be pretty much the same (anybody seen it yet?). And that's okay. Regardless of how hard the movie bites (zing!), I can't wait to see my friends. Team Volturi. (Just kidding :)

Happy Weekending!

*normalish

**Home Alone, Muppet Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown, Serendipity, Love Actually, and a tape full of Christmas Cartoons that came on when I was a kid. The best part is that the commercials are still on the tape.

*** Cooking purists will probably insist it is easier to mix the dry stuff before you put in the eggy stuff ... but you can mix it all at once and they taste good too ;)