I refused to even look at the half price clearance sales on Valentine items last week. My husband looked.
I did not think we needed a thing. My husband saw a few things he thought we should have.
I did not want to have any candy in the house. My husband selected two packages of candy, brought them home and set them on the counter.
I did not need another heart-shaped cookie cutter. Last fall I winnowed out several of my rarely-used cookie cutters, but my husband saw a set of increasingly larger sizes of hearts. He wanted them, so he bought them.
Walking through the grocery and department stores, I disciplined myself to turn my face and walk past the marked-down cake mixes with Valentine themes and pink frosting with heart-shaped sprinkles. We are trying to eat sensibly now that the holidays are over. Fruits and vegetables have dominated the meals around here. But, the holidays never really end for my husband. He came home with a couple of sacks of candy, two cake mixes, a tub of frosting and some Valentine pencils.
“We can always use pencils,” he said as he placed them beside the two dozen other pencils on top of the refrigerator.
I shook my head in disbelief. When he left, I put it all away in the cupboard to use some day – or to discretely give away during a food drive.
I never had a chance. Four days later he looked at me and asked, with some urgency in his voice, “Can we make sugar cookies?”
I looked at him. I had other plans for my day. But he looked so pathetic, I agreed. “Okay. I guess if I can’t make heart-shaped cookies with the grandchildren, I can make them with the grandfather.” Besides, if we made cookies, it would ensure we had a dish of food to carry to the church gathering that evening. I looked for a quick, less messy way to fulfill his wish.
I pulled out a cookie recipe book and picked up one of the cake mixes. It said it included pudding and gave a recipe for cookies. I used the mix as if it were all the flour, sugar and leavening agents listed in the cookbook, added half a cup of room temperature butter and about the same amount of butter- flavored Crisco and one egg. Using a fork, I stirred it into a smooth dough that looked like sugar cookie dough.
It rolled out neatly for cutting like sugar cookies. It baked like sugar cookies. The samples tasted like sugar cookies. I turned the dough over to the man who wanted to make heart-shaped sugar cookies.
He tried all of his cookie cutters and settled on the two smallest hearts. He rolled out the dough, slid the stone cookie sheets into the oven and arranged the cooling racks.
An hour later we stood at the counter working together, slathering on pink frosting and decorating them with red and white sprinkles and red sugar.
I was finished, but not my husband.
“Do we have a box to carry them in?”
“We can use that big plate,” I said.
That was not good enough.
He found a square box, cut square cardboard to make layers, added dark chocolate hearts to the cookies in the corner so the cardboard would not touch the frosting and arranged layers of cookies with wrapped candies placed between the cookies.
They looked quite festive and he had a box of Valentines to carry to his friends this year. He loved every minute of the attention and the compliments it brought to him.
I bet we do it again next year.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)