I’m pretty sure I was in Grade 1 or 2 that day my mother told me we were going to invite some of my friends over to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas.

She’d found a recipe somewhere and thought it would be fun for us all to do some Christmas baking together. I was an only child, so the neighbourhood kids were my surrogate brothers and sisters as I was growing up. We did everything together.

We picked a day and my mother started the process of making the gingerbread dough. I remember being in the kitchen with my friends, giggling as we rolled out the dough and cut the cookies.

The really fun part was decorating them with silver balls for eyes and red and green crystals. And icing. Lots of icing. We used knives to spread it all around and toothpicks to tweak it.

I’m pretty sure we ate half of the cookies as we were decorating. We definitely licked a lot of icing.

Ever since that time, gingerbread has been a part of my Christmas, whether it’s cookies or gingerbread houses. Oh, I’ve tried other store-bought gingerbread, but nothing compares to the home made stuff. You know?

My mother was an artsy-craftsy type, so she was always creating something. One day she discovered a way to make a big square candle using a 1 liter milk container as a form, so she made a Christmas candle.

All too soon, when I wasn’t quite 15 years old, my mother died of cancer. Suddenly all of the things that she’d made with her own hands became really important to me.

I don’t know how, but I managed to keep that candle with me when I moved away from home at the age of 18. And through a half a dozen moves I made over the next few years, I hung on to it. The truth is that I’m still surprised that I managed not to lose it or forget it somewhere.

When my two daughters were little, we began the tradition of making gingerbread too. And as a way of remembering my mother and my first gingerbread baking session, I pulled out the old candle and lit it.

From then on, we lit that candle every year and put it on the table beside us as we listened to Christmas music and made our gingerbread cookies.

Eventually I realized that the candle was going to burn down completely if we kept burning it (duh), and we didn’t want that to happen! So I started putting a tea candle inside it and lit that instead. Which explains the picture you see here.

No, the candle doesn’t look like much anymore. It’s more than 50 years old! But it really means everything to my daughters and to me. Even though my girls never had the opportunity to meet their grandmother Fanny, it’s a way of having her with us every year as we do our baking. Just a simple little tradition.

There are all kinds of stories out there from people recounting their Christmas traditions, many of them quirky, funny, and almost always sentimental in some way.

Even when you’re going through the worst of times, if you can have that one little thing you do, it brings back the cozy warmth of a Christmas memory. There’s nothing like it.

So Merry Christmas. And may the memories of your Christmas traditions give you great joy and comfort this year.

IJ