The Rift of the Magi

For my bohemian parents, Christmas raised disturbing philosophical conflicts. Should the family that subscribes to Psychology Today, Avant Garde and Mother Jones really celebrate Christmas at all?

First there was the stress of realizing that Yuletide expectations are usually born to be dashed. For my mother it might take months to recover from the sight of her seven little radical doves reunited over the holidays in an earnest approximation of joyful bonding, just to watch them flutter off again at New Year’s.

Then there was the hackneyed grinch of commercialism--always a crack in the foundation of the liberal conscience. These were among the factors that tended to invoke a seasonal cry of “Humbug, man!” After all, we were a family trained to endure sparsely attended candlelight peace vigils.

Then there was the question of food. Over the years almost all the foodstuffs temptingly depicted in the 30-second commercial flashes between “The Monkees” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” were purged from our diet. We kids identified with Yogi Bear’s plaintive cry upon being denied another picnic basket: “Oh, no! Not nuts and berries!”

Sugar was an early victim of this weaning process. Soon even the “raw” sugar that once graced our farina was banished because of its dubious corporate aura.

Only three of us--my little sister Nina, my little brother Kaj and I--refused to succumb to the wonders of textured soy meal. Coincidentally, it was was the three of us, the health-food holdouts, who loved every tacky trapping of Christmas, right down to the tinsel. We celebrated with a neurotic fervor that undoubtedly proved our more thoughtful siblings’ theories correct.

As the holidays arrived, we played relentlessly on Mom’s confused nostalgia for earlier Christmases--before the war, before the divorce, even before product-labeling disclosure reform--by volunteering selflessly to help her relive that simpler era through cookies: subliminal subway tokens to Christmases gone by.

Even the most reformed palate must harbor a few errant taste buds that salivate at the thought of Christmas sweets. The quantities needed to satisfy seven kids and to fill baskets for 40 or 50 of my parents’ friends was an epoch of excess. But this was before my mother’s sour-cream nut cake was replaced by the dreaded Armenian rock bread. Before the poreless whole-wheat crusts of (barely) honey-sweetened pies--designed to weather more seasonal onslaught than the Capitol dome--replaced the Aunt Win’s delicious dream bars, Dot’s bon-bons, or Mrs. Cedergren’s freezer rolled butter cookies, with dough so tantalizing that only half of what went into the freezer ever seemed to come out of it.

But it takes more than cookies and dream bars to bring the Christmas spirit alive in an “enlightened” California household. And so, as Nina, whose piercing falsetto had a range exceeded only by that of a tea kettle, sang the higher registers of “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” or uncannily reproduced the most annoying nuances of Joan Baez’s nasal, emotionless reading of “Ave Maria,” we three cookie kings would labor at our own version of the Resurrection: the frosting-heavy, butter-rich, candy-encrusted barn-raising of ever more elaborate gingerbread houses.

The unspoken logic was this: If with dedication, reverence and perseverance we amateurs could raise a cathedral of indulgence to rival Hansel and Gretel’s most illicit dreams, then surely the ghost of Christmas past would be made, if not flesh, then dough, and doubts surrounding the “centeredness” of Christmas would be erased. It would indeed be groovy to celebrate, however secularly, all over again!

Fanciful paper patterns were laid on heavy oily dough--one year a turret, the next, a front porch (to presage the craftsman rage by a decade). The rule was that everything had to be edible, from the shingles (black-and-white spiral cookies) to the chimney (red-yolk-glazed gingerbread with frosting mortar). The only exception: Nina’s obsessively detailed watercolors, which, like an Advent calendar, made each window a glimpse of not-quite-obtainable glory.

We made gumdrop-lined, hard-candy-tiled walkways, candy-cane columns and circus-peanut-adorned window frames. Triple recipes of frosting were needed to snowscape the entire breadboard and glue the always slightly skewed structure together. The only efficient way to keep our fingers clean was to lick them. This led to many an evening spent queasily in bed, hoping for one last rerun of “The Bishop’s Wife,” in which angel Cary Grant, by the power of God, decorates a tree so garishly that even John Waters would have found religion.

Finally, the house was set in the center of the dinner table . . . and lo! The tofu dressing tasted somehow merrier! The spell was broken!

When, after New Year’s, it came time to scrape the bread board clean, Mom always wanted to keep the houses. The gingerbread had long since turned concrete, so it wasn’t impossible, but we always said, “No, throw it away.” Part or even most of the magic was its transience; who wants to watch such a brittle dream gather dust? No one ever ate the houses anyway, except the year when our cat Tarzana found that front porch particularly irresistible.

And each year, as the doves flew off to spearhead green causes and the last ginger steeple nestled at the bottom of the Rubbermaid kitchen pail, a scarlet-clad elf looking a lot like Allen Ginsberg ho-hoed into China Slick Kantner’s ear, “Christmas isn’t politically incorrect after all!”

AUNT WIN’S DREAM BARS

3 cups brown sugar, packed

2 cups plus 4 teaspoons flour

1 cup butter

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 1/2 cups shredded coconut

2 cups chopped walnuts

1 teaspoon baking powder

Combine 1 cup brown sugar and 2 cups flour in bowl. Cut in butter, mixing until evenly distributed. Pat 1/2-inch thick into greased 13x9-inch baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees 10 minutes. Remove from oven.

Beat eggs. Mix well with remaining 2 cups brown sugar, vanilla, coconut, walnuts, baking powder and remaining 4 teaspoons flour. Spread over pastry crust in pan.

Bake at 350 degrees 20 to 30 minutes. Cut into 32 bars. Makes 32 bars.

Note: Timing has always been frustratingly approximate. I always cook the bars a little longer than the directions. But remember, the bars keeps cooking as they cool, and these should be chewy, never hard.

Each serving contains about:

228 calories; 87 mg sodium; 42 mg cholesterol; 12 grams fat; 28 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams protein; .51 gram fiber; 49% calories from fat.