All About Thyme: December 2024
Finding More Greenspace in Your Life
December’s Special Days: A Potpourri of Celebrations
Herb of the Year for 2024. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium). Selected by the International Herb Association
Flower of the Month for December: Poinsettia
December is National Eggnog Month. Fruit Cake Month, too.
Week 1
December 5. World Soil Day. Soils are where our food begins.
December 6. National Cookie Day
December 8. National Chocolate Brownie Day (It's true: Chocolate really is an herb!)
Week 2
December 12. Gingerbread House Day, also National Poinsettia Day
December 13. St. Lucia's Festival of Light, celebrated with the baking of Lussekatter.
Week 3
December 17. On this day in 1843, "A Christmas Carol" was published. Also, National Maple Syrup Day
December 21, 3:19 a.m. CT: Winter Solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year.
Week 4
December 23. Look for my post, Growing Green with the Zodiac: Capricorn Season. December 24. National Eggnog Day—just in time for Christmas Eve
December 25. At last, Christmas! Have a merry (and healthy) holiday. And Hanukkah starts this evening, ends January 2.
December 26. The beginning of Kwanzaa, an annual celebration of African-American culture, ending on New Year’s Day in a communal feast called Karamu.
December 31: New Year’s Eve. As you ring in the next year, be joyful—and safe! See you in 2025!
Gingerbread Tree Decorations
I surveyed the shop, which was beautifully decorated for Christmas with wooden bowls of clove-studded pomanders and potpourri, a tiny Christmas tree decorated with gingerbread cookies and popcorn-and-cranberry chains, and fresh green branches of rosemary everywhere. —Mistletoe Man: A China Bayles Mystery
Christmas is still a few weeks away, which makes this a good time to think about baking some gingerbread decorations for the tree—not as much pressure to get things done, and maybe a little more time to enjoy a project that the kids and grandkids will love. You’ll have to lay down some ground rules about eating their creations, of course, but that’s all part of the fun.
Gingerbread Tree Decorations
1 1/4 cup butter or margarine, room temperature
1 1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 cups sifted flour
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cloves
3 teaspoons nutmeg
Combine butter or margarine, sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract. Cream well until smooth. Sift together dry ingredients. Stir into butter mixture until smooth, adding more flour if necessary to form a firm, slightly sticky dough. Wrap in plastic and chill until cold. Roll out 3/8” thick and cut into holiday shapes. With a chopstick, make a hole through each shape for hanging. Bake at 350 degrees until brown underneath and slightly pale on top. If you want to make more, it’s easier to make separate batches than to double the recipe. Decorate with frosting and colored candies.
Did you know? The term “gingerbread” is an Anglicization of the Old French gingebras, derived from the Latin name of the spice, zingebar. The word originally referred only to preserved ginger, which was primarily used medicinally to treat nausea and upset stomach.
Preserved ginger? No, it’s not the same thing as crystallized (candied) ginger. This condiment—fresh young gingerroot preserved in sugar syrup—is quintessentially British, so most of us here in the U.S. have never heard of it or have seen it only in specialty shops. But it’s easily made and you’ll love it, especially over ice cream or in curries. The English Kitchen tells us how, in helpful detail, with photos. Please, please pay special attention to the caution about buying only fresh young gingerroot. (Believe me. Old, dried-out gingerroot refuses to yield, no longer how long you cook it.)
Something similar to our modern cake-style gingerbread didn’t appear until the early fifteenth century, when it was made with honey, grated dry bread, spices, and sugar. It wasn’t baked, but pressed, warm, into a container where it cooled into a chewy confection. Recipes of the period describe the ingredients and the method of preparation but neglect to tell us how much. (Quantity standardization began only about 130 years ago with the publication of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.) To make an early gingerbread:
Take goode honey & clarifie it on ye fere, & take fayre paynemayn or wastel brede & grate it, & caste it into ye boylenge hony, & stere it well togyder faste with a sklyse that it bren not to ye vessell. & thanne take it doun and put therin ginger, longe pepper & saundres, & tempere it vp within ye handes; & thanne put hem to a flatt boyste & strawe thereron suger, & prick therin clowes rounde aboute by ye egge and in ye mydes, yf it plece you.
—(Good) Curye on Inglysch p. 154 (Goud Kokery no. 18)
My translation:
Take good honey & boil it on the fire [skimming it clean]; and take pain demain [white wheat bread] or wastel [wheat bread with some bran] & grate it and cast it into the boiling honey and stir it together well with a slice [a flat wooden stick] so it doesn’t burn in the vessel. And then take it off the fire and add ginger, long pepper, and saffron, and mix it with the hands. And then put it into a flat box and sprinkle sugar on it, and insert cloves around the edges and in the middle, if it please you.
Blessings on Fannie Farmer and her standard measuring cup!
December’s To-Do
"Marley was dead, to begin with." Did any story ever offer a more tantalizing first line? Read the 1911 edition of Dickens' Christmas classic on the Library of Congress website, with evocative illustrations by A.C. Michael. And find a recipe for the "Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop" that Old Scrooge and Bob Cratchit enjoy on the very last page.
Yes, cookies have a history. The story of these little flat, round, hard cakes begins in 7th-century Persia, boosted by the growing production of sugar. Cookies went to Europe with the Muslims who conquered Spain, and by the 14th century, they were a Thing. For the full story, go here. For China Bayles’ all-thyme cookie favorite, bake a batch of Ruby's Hot Lips Cookie Crisps.
If you are smiling at the idea of a World Soil Day, stop. Instead, read What Your Food Ate, by David Montgomery and Ann Bikle. You’ll see why healthy soils are essential to human health.
Not just for pancakes. Mohawk and other Northeastern tribes prepared a blood purifier, eye medicine, and cough medicine from the bark of maple trees. And just like us, they harvested the sap and boiled it, as a sweetener. For a baker’s dozen sweet & savory maple recipes, go here. (That decadent maple-rosemary French toast is a winner.)
How many eggnog recipes do you have in your file? Not nearly enough, of course. Here are a gazillion more—bet there are some you've never thought of. And to go with your eggnog (or mulled wine or hot cider), some very special eggnog cookies with eggnog glaze. Oh, my!
Celebrate Kwanzaa with a great Kwanzaa feast. Recipes & ideas for a bright and lively celebration.
It’s fun to browse through this Pinterest collection of holiday sweets I put together several years ago. And if you’re looking for a good holiday-themed mystery, here is an intriguing trio: The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle, Holly Blues and Mistletoe Man.)
Watch for the launch of my Guerrilla Readers group in January. Look here for details. If you have suggestions for the reading list, let me know in the comments on this post.
Whew—lots going on in December. Thanks for persevering all the way to the end of this long post! And if you haven’t caught up with the latest China Bayles mystery, Forget Me Never, here’s what you’re looking for.
Susan, what a pleasure to stop the craziness for a few minuted to read this 😁 My son and daughter-in-law are currently taking an online course about soil amendment using natural methods, I bought them a microscope to facilitate their work and get to see some fascinating videos of the tiny, mysterious beings constantly at work under our feet. Shall send them a greeting on National Soil Day! Hope I can find some time in the next days to at least look at all the recipes - but as my daughter and grand-daughter celebrate their Double Birthday on the 14th and Christmas looms with the usual ‘who goes where when’ complications, baking time may be a no go. This little break was a joy 🎄
I could take this newsletter and do one thing each day from the possibilities and it would make for a very tasty, fragrant, fun-filled holiday month. As it is, I have so much music to work on and so many rehearsals and concerts (both attending and performing), that one activity per 3 days seems more realistic. Now how to choose?
I do have a project lined up for Wednesday. Our church has a holiday fair and a tradition of selling evergreen swags made by a crew of volunteers. My rosemary bush is out of hand again (as in, encroaching on the sidewalk), so I will be doing some major pruning in order to donate the cuttings to the swag-making crew. They are tackling their job on Thursday, so when I go to Wednesday night choir practice I will take along a pile of branches for them to use.
There was rosemary in all the dishes I cooked for Thanksgiving except for dessert. As well as sage and thyme in the dressing and rubbed on the bird.
The remaining unripe figs have fallen off the trees. The hardy kiwi vines, though, are holding their fruit and make tasty snacks. I have to trek out to the medlar to see if they are ready to harvest. Probably yes.