Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

960 Sugarcubes

Sugarcubes

(Sorry to be posting late! Monday holiday confused me. But here we are! -ctan)
—
The next day Remo left and Claire declared it was Cookie Baking Day. I didn't realize that the traditional holiday calendar had Cookie Baking Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day, but to hear Claire tell it, we would have been committing some kind of sacrilege not to observe it.

"You need to get more butter. We're going to need more butter than this," Claire harangued Janine as Janine was on her way out the door to work, opening and closing the fridge, the cabinets. "And flour. This probably isn't enough flour."

"Mother. I'm not coming back until ten o'clock tonight." In other words, if you want to bake before midnight this is not my problem. Janine kissed Landon on the forehead and told him, "You be good, okay? Bedtime is eight o'clock. I'll come kiss you while you're sleeping when I get home, all right?"

"But it's Christmas vacation," he said. "Why do you have to go to work?"

"Just because your school has vacation doesn't mean my work does. I'm off tomorrow and the day after that, though, okay?"

"Oh, okay." He trudged away from the door dramatically, though. Yeah, kid, day jobs suck. He climbed into the kitchen chair next to me and folded his arms.

Claire went to work on his mood immediately. "Landon, do you want to bake cookies today? Today is the day we bake all the Christmas cookies. Do you like cookies?"

It worked. He brightened right up. "I like cookies! I like Oreos and fudge stripes and–"

"Oh, these will be different because we're going to make them ourselves, all right?" Claire leaned down to talk to him. "That is, if we can get enough butter and flour..."

Courtney rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on, Mom. We have a car and money. There's not, like, a wartime shortage on flour going on or something. There's no suspense about fricking baking. Don't make the kid worry."

Claire straightened up into her soprano-solo pose. "Cookie Baking Day is important to me, so I am anxious about it. You had best learn that the way to help me with my anxiety is not to dismiss it."

Courtney's reply to that was to roll her eyes again.

It was not a large kitchen so pretty much all of this was going on right in front of my face. I was sitting at the table nursing my second coffee of the morning. "Make a shopping list and I'll go," I said.

"We'll need some things for Christmas dinner, too," she said.

"Make a long list, then," I said and Landon giggled.

"Yeah, grocery run!" Courtney said to him and tickled him from behind his chair. "You want to come help us with the epic quest to get all the groceries, Lanny?"

"Yeah!"

So that was how me and Courtney took a fired-up five-year-old to the store. Claire came with us, too.

The list Claire had made was quite long and included most of the things you'd expect for an American Christmas dinner: turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and other beige/brown foods. Courtney kept Landon entertained on the quest by tearing things off the bottom of the list, and then the two of them would swoop around the store finding them and bringing them back to the cart, while Claire and I just started at one end of the store and zigzagged our way up and down the aisles like a very small combine harvester.

We started in the meat department with the turkey, and while we were there I grabbed bacon and other things I thought we'd need since the stores would be closed on Christmas. It was somewhat crowded but it wasn't like we were in a hurry.