Cookie Day Rant

[talon]

With Cookie Day fast approaching (and I still have to select the cookies I will contribute this year!), people who aren't participating in our Cookie Day seem to feel they can tell me what cookies to bake.

I appreciate the help in selecting which cookies to make. Seriously, I do. Over the decades, I have amassed a huge collection of cookie recipes and weeding them down to a mere 3 or 4 cookies to bake for the holy day is a task that needs all the help it can get.

Those people who are genuine in helping me pare the list down are much loved and appreciated. Those who will also be eating my cookies get to lobby for favorites from previous years.

But the others? The ones who whine at me that they can't eat eggs, or they have a problem with cane sugar, or they are vegan and why don't I have cookies they like? Those people aren't going to be receiving any of my cookies. They aren't Numenists, and they aren't on my list of people to whom I send cookies. Why are they so terribly concerned that the cookies I provide my co-religionists adhere to their tastes and needs? Why are they upset that I won't consider vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, macrobiotic no-bake cookies that are eco-friendly and carbon-neutral?

Can I just say this? These cookies are for a celebration, a Holy Day, made from the bounty of the earth to be bounteously shared. There is no stinting on these cookies, no holding back, no compromises. They are filled with the harvest of the earth - flour, eggs, milk, sugar, nuts, fruits, herbs, and more. I will make concessions for the people who will actually eat my cookies based on their actual, genuine, documented allergies (for our House and friends, not just any and every body), but I will not entertain any suggestions from people who will not be eating my cookies based on their allergies, preferences, philosophies.

They are free and welcome to bake whatever cookies suit their needs, but I won't subject my co-religionists to their restrictions.

There's a Numenist philosophy that fits here - I don't like those kinds of cookies, so I can't bake them. The people who will be receiving my cookies also don't like those sorts of cookies, so I can't give them those kinds of cookies.

That's right.

I'm using my religion to bake the kinds of cookies we love best. And vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, macrobiotic no-bake cookies that are eco-friendly and carbon-neutral are so not on the list.

Our cookies will be full of real butter, real eggs, whole milk or full-fat cream, cane and beet sugar, honey, white flour, exotic spices shipped in from around the world, and factory made candy sprinkles and food colorings. They will be a celebration of flavor and bounty and joy, a symbol of love and prosperity drawn from the entire world and baked into a small, crispy, delicious cookie.

For this one festival, calorie-counting diets are ignored, whether the calories are the earth's carbon footprint or a person's calorie intake.

Cookie Day is about bounty, about surplus and overflow, about accepting the gifts of the earth, about goodwill and love and sharing. It is not about deprivation, about restrictions, rules, or control.

So, if you want recipes, I'll post some later.

If you want to gripe that the cookies I'm baking are inedible to you, please whine on your own blog, not here. You're not getting any of my cookies, so why should you care that you can't eat them? I would care if I was baking them for you, but I'm not, so I don't.

So there.

Now, I can move on and select cookies I will be baking.