Christmas baking -- or -- Not that kind of support!

Long Suffering Spouse bakes at Christmas. In truth, whatever small status I may have in my community is based upon this. (That Curmudgeon is a self-important, pompous prig, but his wife bakes good cookies, so let's slate him for the parents' club. Maybe his wife will bake cookies for us!)

To say that my wife makes cookies is like saying that the Red Cross helps out a bit. Compared to my wife's cookies, store bought cookies are little more than compressed sawdust and sweepings.

My wife didn't make these gingersnaps. But her gingersnaps are among my favorites. Along with the oatmeal raisin, and the coconut squares, and the brownies, the hard gingerbread, the soft gingerbread and, when all these are depleted, the sprinkle cookies of various shapes.

Others like the raisin date bars or the wreaths or the Russian tea cakes, although I'll generally leave these alone. And there's others, but I never actually learned their proper names.

And she makes breads, too.

One of our old pastors used to wait by the window of the Rectory when he thought LSS might be delivering Christmas baking -- so he could intercept -- and keep -- all the breads for himself. The office staff knew what he was doing. He hardly ever came out of his office otherwise.

Since LSS has gone back to teaching full time, however, the baking window has shrunk dramatically. This year, the window opened this weekend.

That meant that a bit of planning had to go into the operation -- the giant sacks of flour and sugar had to be laid in and a lot of other things needed to get done first.

But this was also the weekend when the college kids came home. So we had four teenagers in the house. (Well, three teenagers and one post-teen.)

These aren't any of them.

The teenagers believe that they are helping so long as they don't actively impede operations. But Younger Daughter had six baskets of clothes, clean, dirty and probably in-between, in her room -- leaving none to be had anywhere in the house -- and Oldest Son and Middle Son brought home mountains of laundry each -- and expected Long Suffering Spouse to referee who whould have priority use of the laundry facilities.

And they do expect their meals, don't they?

And if they put their dishes in the sink... never the dishwasher, sometimes the sink... well, that's something isn't it?

I blew up a little Sunday morning. Youngest Son was present to catch the flak. I was trying to explain to him... my voice rising the whole while... but never loud enough to disturb the slumber of the sleeping collegians on the second floor... how Mom has limited time to get this done, and how we all have to pull together and provide support for her if she is to have any hope of finishing in time for Christmas. Long Suffering Spouse was in the room with me... probably wondering whether she'd need to go looking for the tranquilizer darts.

Youngest Son didn't bat an eye. I finished my little speech about the necessity to provide support for his mother and he immediately responded, "You're doing a heck of a job, Mom, I'm behind you 100%."