Bread-Making Day

She wakes up before the sun rises and turns on the Kitchenaid mixer. The bread-making process starts at about 5:00 am and continues until the late hours of the night. She takes an entire day off from work. And that's how we know Christmas is around the corner. My mom dedicates an entire day solely to making bread.

It's a long process to say the least, but it's one that has some of the most delicious results I've ever tasted. The dough is extremely yeast-y and filled with ground spices like cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg. Honestly, I've never known exactly what spices go into the bread, because they come to us from my yiayia in a plastic baggie all mixed together without a label in sight. And nobody asks questions, we just know that these are the spices and they do magical things for our beloved bread.

Christmas in my house usually starts with the tree. We have a tradition of going to pick out our Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It's something we've done for a long time, with my two best friends and their families, and we haven't broken the tradition since.

Then come the decorations. My mom puts so many things on the walls and the counters and the tables and the banisters, that by the time she's done, it looks like Santa has thrown up all over the house. And I love it. I love the soft glow that the small white Christmas lights give the house and the way that everything just seems more cheerful.

But despite all the decorations and the tree that sits comfortably in the corner, it never truly feels like Christmas until bread-making day comes.

Once the final loaf is finished baking (which would probably be about the twentieth loaf of the day) my mom is too tired to even make dinner. So we have bread. We eat it fresh out of the oven, still warm, with butter melting into all of the pores in the soft, chewy dough. The sesame seeds on top get gently toasted during the baking process and make the crust a bit nutty in flavor. It's heaven. Heaven and Christmas all in one bite.

But my mom is notorious for being a terrible baker. One summer, we were in Grand Cayman on vacation and my mom decided to make box mix brownies for dessert. When she realized we were out of eggs, she concluded that replacing the eggs with extra vegetable oil would suffice. Well the brownies came out looking like freshly-poured tar, and tasted even more so like it. We tried them anyhow, so she wouldn't feel too bad, but they literally stuck to the crevices in our teeth and really overstayed their welcome.

Still, this bread is one thing she can't mess up. And it actually calls for some real baking. I'm talking yeast, measured ingredients, letting the dough rise, pounding it down, letting it rise again. It's a science...not a box mix. And she never messes it up. So that must be saying something.

She wraps each loaf in plastic wrap and labels each one with a festive sticker to write each recipients name on. Even our mailman gets a loaf of bread for the holidays.

It's this bread that reminds me of the holidays. A simple, peasant's food that makes it the most wonderful time of the year. And even if she replaced the eggs for oil, it'd probably still be delicious.

Photo: http://eggsonsunday.wordpress.com/