Words by Andrea Goto
Photography by Chia Chong
Photo Styling by Libbie Summers
Every Christmas my sister and I would help Mom haul the boxes of decorations from the attic, tape paper snowmen with moveable arms and legs to the windows, and determine the place of honor for her beloved 2-foot tall stuffed Santa who looked like the spawn of an Oompa Loompa and a garden gnome—in other words, absolutely terrifying. Like an Elf on the Shelf before his time, my sister and I would wake every morning to see if Scary Santa had moved half an inch—proof that he stood next to our beds and watched us sleep.
But the tradition I most looked forward to was making Christmas cookies to put on gigantic platters for when my parents’ friends dropped in. We made dozens of recipes—date balls rolled in coconut, almond cookies, pecan thumbprint cookies filled with jelly—nearly every one laced with nuts and some sort of dried fruit. They were not child friendly, but like Eggnog and Tomato Aspic (shudder), they weren’t really for us. All the same, I developed a taste for every crunchy, gooey cookie my mom made—every cookie except for her “Dizzy Lizzies,” a.k.a. fruitcake in disguise.
Mom loves Dizzy Lizzies. The recipe has been in our family for generations—I think my great-grandmother even donned them Dizzy Lizzies “because you first soak the raisins in rum,” mom told me, winking conspiratorily. Yes, another raisin-infested cookie—there’s not enough rum on the planet to remedy that situation. But the festival of misfit fruits didn’t stop there. “You can chop the candied fruit,” I remember mom saying as she handed me a plastic container of wet, jeweled-toned gummies that looked as much like fruit as it tasted like candy: not at all.
“What the…?” I cried as I spit the chewy mass into the sink.
“Don’t waste them—they’re expensive!”
I have no idea why Franken fruit is expensive. More than that, I have no idea why someone would ruin a cookie with it. Alas, now that I’ve come of cookie-bearing age, I fear Lizzy may have spun her final drunken spin.
Lucky for Liz, my sentimental sister—a far better person than I—will keep the fruitcake cookie tradition alive. As the eldest, she will also bear the burden of Scary Santa. And just as it was when we were little, most of the Dizzy Lizzies will go uneaten, sitting in deep-freeze well past July. And just as it was when we were little, her children will lie awake at night in fear, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny plastic boots, and the joys of Christmas traditions will play on.
