The Christmas Kitchen

The charming gingerbread house Ollie Alpert designed for Good Housekeeping's
December 1990 cover. It was up to me and my boss, Ruth Arnstein, to comb the directions
carefully so that readers could build a dream house like this, too! Yikes.

It has begun in earnest--Christmas baking season. I know I'm not alone, because at ShopRite this afternoon, I had to kneel down and dig to the very back of the shelf to find the last three boxes of confectioners sugar [I needed one]. The Ghirardelli semisweet chips were sold out, and the starlight mints in the candy aisle were down to the last bag, too. But I decided to go with candy canes to decorate a chocolate cake I'm making this weekend.

The butter was on sale--and the Baker's Joy nonstick spray. The graham cracker crumbs were front and center. Eggnog of every kind, too. Magazine racks everywhere are stocked with a zillion beautiful choices that invite us to bake cakes [from sophisticated chocolate-ribbon-wrapped to snowy-white-frosting-topped], gingerbread, cookies of every kind.

Candyland Cottages
When I worked at Good Housekeeping, my editor passed onto me the painstaking job of editing the directions for the cover gingerbread house, a tradition the readers looked forward to every year. Ollie Alpert, an amazing artist and baker, designed the intricate little homes, and the GH readers clamored for them. Her fairy-tale cookie barns, houses and churches were simply adorable, with shingles and pathways and candles in the windows to boot. My job was to make sure the reader would be able to put it together with Ollie's directions. My boss [Ruth] and I learned to study Ollie's cardboard model house from every angle to check exactly how the chimney and every last detail was assembled.

Eventually, the top editors decided to stop printing the directions and patterns in the magazine [to save space] and invited readers to mail in a stamped, self-addressed envelope to request a copy. We were swamped. The cozy, wood-paneled office Ruth and I shared was the site of much envelope-stuffing, so people could have their directions in time for the holiday baking frenzy.

Right now, my back hurts a bit from hunching over, mixing dough, melting chocolate, washing dishes. I'm just about finished. Just have to pipe the chocolate filling into the thumbprint cookies.

Sweet dreams.