Dad’s Christmas Candy Michael W. Updike I remember Daddy would get this certain look on his two-days- since- he-last- shaved face a few weeks before Christmas. He’d put down his whittlin’ knife, stack the last few sticks of firewood on the back porch(or make us boys stack it!) and cover up his old Heddon tackle-box and wooden Jon-boat for the winter. I’d see him stroll into the house like he was on a mission and open our raw plywood kitchen cabinets, looking for the proper ingredients to make his world-famous (small world, but famous as it was) Pin-wheel Peanut-butter Candy! He’d ask Momma for the wax-paper like he didn’t know where it was even though for 25 years before and after, he watched her slap venison or baloney or whisper-thin A&P ham and cheese on bread, wrap it up and send him out to bring home the bacon. He’d fumble around and find the confectioner’s sugar stashed behind the “Grandma’s Molasses”, maybe gripping the jar-top like a thousand spoonsful before, but stopping just as his mind fixed him back on his task at hand. There always seemed to be an extra jar of Peter Pan bought and stored at this time of year and Daddy gleamed as he found it. Do mothers know everything? ‘Cause she knew Christmas meant Dad would be at it again; yep, candy-making. Now, not to detract from the Christmas thing, but I’d like to mention that Dad only came into the kitchen to eat, (there was no dining room, that was for more important folk) to get his coffee or to make his two or three specialties – fried fresh-caught bass, hush puppies in the spring and potato soup on cold winter’s evenings. The only other thing, unless Momma was in the hospital or some such absence, was this Christmas candy. He’d get the biggest bowl in the cabinet out and mix a little flour, all of the confectioner’s sugar and just enough fresh milk to make a huge sugar-dough ball which would provide the white part of this delicious, super-rich tasting pin-wheel. Once he had that mixed up and he had attained just the right “consisitancy”, uhmm-huh, that’s just how he said it… “consisitancy”, he would spread out way too much wax-paper on the black and silver plastic tabletop and put some flour on that to prevent the thing from sticking. Then he would plop the sugar-dough ball out on the wax-paper and roll it out with Momma’s rolling pin. When that was accomplished, he would begin to spoon-spread the peanut butter throughout the center of rolled-out sugar-dough ball until the spread was everywhere but the outer edges of the former sugar-dough ball. Then he’d pick up one wax-paper edge, while looking around to make sure his “pupils” (us boys) were absorbing the intricacies of pin-wheel candy -making, and roll up the sugar dough/peanut butter conglomeration into a pin-wheel. Now, for an eight year old boy who had literally been snake-bit, this long white rolled-up candy looked like a snake from, maybe, the North Pole or something. Just as an aside, the snake I had encountered had bitten me as I washed 9-lb bass slime off my hands in the dimming hours of sunset. I jerked back so fast that I actually snatched the snake’s fangs out of his head, no kidding, I kept one fang for years after that. But I digress… Daddy would then cut the pin-wheel candy into bite-size pieces and place them in metal cookie tins and give them to friends and family for Christmas. It was Dad’s Christmas tradition and a cherished one, at that. Now, around the coldest part of February or so, our stash of pin-wheel peanut butter candy would be diminished, then depleted, then scarce, then finally we’d be down to the last piece or two. I think that last piece of candy could serve as the perfect metaphor for the fleeting days of a relationship or a life. The sweetness still over-powering the tongue, or the heart as the case may be, the savoring, the lingering flavor, the final hard-swallow of the last remnants of something beautiful, then gone. The taste, no longer on the tongue, only in the mind. Something so tantalizing, so wonderful, disappearing as a sunset into the cold, Christmas nighttime. Shimmering stars mark Dad’s pathway to Heaven or a flaming star marking a good love’s bright, then fading, trail. The memories, though, aren’t meant to fade.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:14:04 +0000
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