Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: What food do you always reject on the holiday table? Why?

Well, remember how I said I loved the German cookie springerle? I really can't stand the German candied bread that can be used as currency in my family. Like currency, like I can trade it like cold, hard cash.

Stollen takes approximately seven years to make and is full of candied fruits and raisins. You make it into little loaves that my father hoards like bricks of gold. It can be eaten at any time of day, for breakfast, as a snack, with dinner, as dessert (like bacon).

And I can't stand it. Maybe it's the taste, maybe it's the texture of things being embedded in my bread (I don't like raisin toast, either), maybe it's rebellion against the idea that we must all love this crazy-ass holiday food.

I also won't eat mashed potatoes, any vegetable topped with marshmallows, cranberry sauce or gravy.

You?

Today's #BlogHerWritingLab prompt is: Finish this sentence with your favourite food: "The holidays are not complete without..."

My answer is: springerle. They are German cookies that have cool patterns and I never liked them until my mom made them a different way about ten years ago and suddenly they were fluffy instead of hard and I fell in endless love with them. I remember we had both the embossed rolling pin and the little wooden blocks. I have yet to make them myself because my mother is still making them for me, but she bought me my own rolling pin for when the day comes I have to fend for myself. Which I will, because even though I'm the one in the family who rarely eats the sweets but hoovers the Chex mix, springerle is important to me. Here's my rolling pin.

We went to Iowa for Christmas.

 

This was our 2009 contribution to the memory tree.

We arrived just hours before the blizzard.

 

I can't put my arms down.

The snow fell for three days straight.

 

The little angel in her new snow bed.

It fell and fell and fell, and so we were obligated to go terrace sledding in our insulated coveralls.

 

As you do. I love a man in Carharts.

We played and played until her face matched her new Walmart snow pants,which we procured for $12 after realizing we brought the boots and coatand forgot the rest at home.

Less than enthused when the snow gets in the hood.

 And she screamed and laughed, fearless in the face of snow up to her thighs, and we played Queen of the Mountain and rode saucers over broken cornstalks and ate springerle and stollen and brownies.

All in all, it was the best Christmas yet.