He loved cookie dough.

If Leif were here, he'd be eating this. He loved cookie dough, particularly this kind of cookie dough, for Norwegian Berliner Kranse. This is our family's favorite cookie and a Christmas tradition. I grew up with it, and so did my mother and her mother, and her grandmother. It's an old and strange recipe that uses both raw and hardboiled egg yolks pressed through a sieve, and it's wonderful. Leif and his brother used to tell me I should just put the bowl of cookie dough on the table and let them eat it instead of dinner.

I always loved making cookies with my boys. These were especially good for kids to help make the dough because you have to work the flour in with your hands. What kid doesn't like squishing his hands in flour, sugar and butter? We had a good time making the dough and eating it, forming and baking the sugar covered rings. I practically had to guard the cookies to make sure we still had some for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The tradition was to bake them on the 23rd.

So, I baked them today, but it was only fun through nostalgia for all those Christmases past. When my boys grew up, they no longer wanted to help, but they still liked to eat the dough and the cookies. Later my grandchildren helped make them.

This is the first time in a long time we haven't had either of our sons or our grandchildren with us for Christmas, and it seems too quiet and not really festive. Christmas is meant to be shared. My heart goes out to all those who are alone and lonely on Christmas and New Years.

I have Peter and my mother to spend our traditional Christmas Eve with, and on Christmas Day we will be joined by Leif's best friend and a friend of mine and her sister. I'm glad we will have the company and I hope they'll enjoy the cookies, but it won't be the same as it was when I was looking forward to Leif driving up to our door and Peter Anthony flying in.

This is our sixth Christmas without Leif. It still isn't right. I still miss him. I still want him to come home for Christmas, and I still get tears in my eyes when I hear the song, "I'll Be Home For Christmas." How I wish he were! He could eat all the cookie dough he wanted!

A Christmas "Visit"

I'm sitting here listening to Vangelis, a composer Leif loved, beginning with the end titles from Blade Runner, one of his favorite movies, and thinking of him. It's hard to believe I haven't posted on this blog since December 16th. Each of the days since then we have thought of him, talked of him, missed him, remembered good times with him. We were blessed with family around us, Peter Anthony, our granddaughters, my mother, friends, who kept us busy, happy except for moments when a longing broke through, kept us focused on life and the present so much better than we would have been if we had been alone. 

Even this fourth Christmas without Leif doesn't feel right, though. He should have been with us, enjoying all the fun, the foods he loved. He would have participated in the lively political and historical discussions with fervor, laughed at the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows, talked about all the latest technology, and eaten too much potato lefse and Berliner Kranse. He would have loved the movies, played the games.

He could not be with us, but we went to the cemetery, which was decked out in wreaths and flowers, on December 28. It's a beautiful place, but a place full of both peace and sadness.

I cried, as I always do, and was glad for the long, tight hugs from Peter and Peter Anthony, so thankful they were with me. It still hurts to look at that marble slab with his name on it and know that all that's left of his earthly remains are behind it, yet I want to go there, to acknowledge him in that small symbolic way.

On New Years Eve, I watched the ball drop in Times Square and looked up at the stars in the night sky and thought of him.

I thought again how passionate he would be about the political campaign, wondered as I always do what we might have done to keep him with us.

But this year, more than the past, I was able to embrace the good memories and cherish them without always dissolving into sadness . . . though missing him will always be there. I missed buying him gifts, too. I thought about it when I was wrapping all the others. It still doesn't seem right not to have them for him.

It will be like that when his birthday comes at the end of this month, too.