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

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called Never Mind Astro, I Want Rosie, all about Amazon’s new robot helper Astro.

The robot was basically meant to do a few small things around the house, including turning on lights, acting as a security guard, getting you a beer (but not wine, interestingly), and playing with the kids.

At the time I complained that what I REALLY wanted was a robot that could clean my house.

Well, last Christmas, we got one. Kind of.

Our daughter gave us a Roomba.

So here is a short diary of my experiences with our new housekeeper:

Day One

She doesn’t clean the toilet or do the dishes. She doesn’t make my bed. But she DOES vacuum the floors.

Right now I’m watching as Sara (my husband named the Roomba ‘Serenity’, but I’ve shortened it to something that *I* like) is mapping out our ground floor. The cats are petrified. But curious.

They are following Sara around the house, trying to figure out who she is and what she’s doing. Sara is merrily going about her business.

I can almost hear her wondering “What the heck is this? A cat toy? Useless! And it’s in my way!”

Oddly enough I felt like I should clean up and move a lot of things around before she even got started. But I’ve given up. It’s not my job. Is it?

She softly bumps into a chair leg, then tries again, then tries again, before finally figuring out that she’s not going to get past it. So she spins around and tries another way.

We have the advantage of all of our rooms, including our bedroom, being on the main floor, so she’s got a lot to figure out. Now she knows how I feel.

At this point, Sara is 50 minutes into her mapping and has only used up 15% of her power. Not bad.

A little later and at 53% power left, she’s finished mapping.

It’s quite amazing. When we look at the app, she has mapped the whole main floor, with each room correctly named. How did she figure that out??

The REAL question is: can she do as great a job as I can?

9 months later:

After some time with Sara, I’ve decided that she does indeed come in handy. Especially those weeks when I don’t feel like doing anything. When you have cats, you have a lot of cat hair to keep up with.

And she cleans under my bed. Even I don’t go there.

Through the app, we can command her to vacuum even when we’re not at home. I haven’t figured out how to do that myself yet.

But. I’m superior at vacuuming. What can I say? I’ve practiced using a vacuum for years. I know every nook and cranny of my house. That’s because I have a much more advanced map of it in my brain than Sara does.

I can see when I haven’t caught that one little bit of fluff that’s still lying there. I can go over an area if I’m not quite happy with it. Sara isn’t that particular. I know, because sometimes I have to clean up after her.

I don’t need to re-charge. Well, not the way Sara does, anyway. A couple of sips of coffee will do.

And I can dust the furniture. I mean, don’t the two go hand-in-hand? When Sara can figure out how to dust too, I’ll have more respect for her.

The cats are more or less bored by her now. When they hear her little motor rev up, they just move somewhere else to catnap. And she has learned to ignore their toys.

I eagerly anticipate this type of technology becoming more advanced as we get older. A sort of Rosie meets Astro meets Sara thing who can clean the bathroom and vacuum and dust and make my bed.

Oh, and cook too! Yeah, get me one of those.