Christmas is all about spending time with your relatives and enjoying your memories or traditions together. This year we are holding a festival in honor of the Wilsons and our love for desserts! We encourage you to come with your favorite dessert, an empty belly, or both.
As our family values bonding the most, our recipes have been passed down from generations and are guaranteed to be nothing short of delicious! We’re excited to see the variety of what everyone brings. We also encourage each dish to represent the traditions of your family and a quick memoir about the dessert.
When: December 24th at the Wilson’s residence in Kentucky starting at 3pm until you are full!
Desserts from the Wilsons
Peanut Butter Balls
Pie Crust Cookies
Red Velvet Cake
History of Desserts
Peanut Butter Balls – these delicious and homemade balls of joy originated in my family for up to 100 years ago. My great-grandmother introduced the recipe after hearing about it from a close family friend. One year, she decided to make them herself and created a tradition that is extremely valued.
Pie Crust Cookies – the uniqueness of the cookies isn’t the only interesting part of these cookies, but rather the history that comes with them. These cookies have been in my family for up to 5 generations from a bakery owned from a relative.
Red Velvet Cake – a treat that can be associated with any time of the year. This dessert is fairly new to our family as the tradition of baking a red velvet cake began less than 20 years ago. My grandmother knew that I had a love for red velvet cake and began this tradition in my honor.
Each of these desserts convey the values of our family of spending time with another. Since they are time demanding and are completed within on evening, the preparation brings a stronger bond and sense of ease as the big holiday approaches.
The Importance of Our Christmas Traditions
“Each of the customs and symbols found in holidays, and related rituals, festivals, and celebrations, has its own story, its own folklore.” (Santino 1994:xvi) captures the essence of the uniqueness of our holiday traditions. Each family participates in their own traditions that is in affiliates with their values. My family, specifically, values quality time and the memories that are formed.
During the holiday season, my family makes an extra effort to continue our traditions because it requires us to spend time with another. Making any of the dishes above, especially the peanut butter balls, demands hours of hard work. Typically, they are make in an assembly line fashion around the kitchen. For example, the order in which the peanut butter balls are made is divided up into segments. One family member (usually my grandmother) will grab all necessary items and ingredients for the preparation. My mother usually melts the chocolate while my grandmother combines the peanut butter mixture. Once those steps are completed, all three of us will roll the peanut butter mixture into appropriate sized balls for dipping later on.
Luckily, the island in the kitchen allows for everyone to be facing another in order to experience this process as a whole. Generations before me endured the same struggles as I have while making these dishes which creates more importance as we are able to share these stories down the grapevine. Jones (1988:242) illuminates this idea of sharing time and the impact of food by writing “people experience food directly and in interaction with selected others. Compelling influences, then, would seem to be found in the qualities that make eating unique and that inhere in specific situations of food preparation, service, and consumption”.
The women, in particular, spend most of the time preparing and cooking for the holidays or special occasions. This left an abundance of story-telling opportunities to be passed along. Much of our time will be consumed with sharing stories of the recent events of the last year and updates on our lives, since we don’t live relatively close.
However, most of our stories come from the dinner itself and the moments shared with our families. Herman (2019:4) says “we eat, therefore we are. Terroir is the experience and emotion, embodiment and immediacy, custom and invention, destiny and storytelling”. Christmas is the biggest advantage that my family has for experiencing all those aspects at once.
A tradition of our family occurs after the dessert preparation is completed. With exhausted hands, we will sit around the fire with hot chocolate awaiting the present reveal. My grandmother gives one gift each being a Hallmark ornament that symbolizes each person. “[Your] mother received an ornament relating to the Wizard of Oz for six years in a row, as that is her favorite movie”, (grandmother).
Sources
Jack Santino. 1994. “Introduction”, “Holidays in America: Ritual, Festival, and Celebration”, and “Homemade Holidays: Making Symbols, Making Meaning”. All Around the Year, xii-46. Urbana, IL: U. of Illinois Press.
Michael Owen Jones. 1988. “Afterword: Discovering the Symbolism of Food Customs and Events”. We Gather Together: Food and Festivals in American Life, Theodore and Lin C. Humphrey, eds, 235-245. Ann Arbor, MI: U. of Michigan Press.
Bernard L. Herman. 2019. Selections from A South You Never Ate. Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina.
