Christmas Eve Mementos
It is December 24, 2009, at about 8 p.m. in our one-level ranch, my second favorite time of the evening. I bound down our ’90s gray carpeted staircase into my family’s wood and stone-wall basement. The air is warm. Tinsel falls precariously from the sleeves of my little red velvet dress, tinsel I collected from brushing through the bottom layers of our plastic-decorated fir snooping for presents. I am carrying a large glass tray of cookies that makes my arms feel like they’re going to fall off. My tights feel itchy, and Christmas carols romance the background of a yule log on our old family box TV in the corner. I attempt to follow my mother’s instructions of distributing dessert before present time to the best of my ability. The tray of kolache and hand-decorated sugar cookies I am carrying almost tips as I bound around the corner railing at full speed, determined to start opening presents as fast as possible, but my father is there to save me from ruining our family’s dessert. I grab haphazardly at the tray for any kind of cookie to munch on while skipping around our small festive basement, offering the tray to each of my relatives, and almost everyone grabs a kolache. I pretend not to care, but I pout internally that no one wanted my sloppy red and green sprinkle cookies my sister and I decorated days prior.
It is my understanding that my grandmother makes kokolache for every single holiday. Kolache (K-Oh-Lotch) is a Czech or Polish pastry, referred to in my family as a “Horseshoe-Nut-Cake ” though the treat is more like a strangely croissant-shaped pie than anything else. For as long as my oldest relatives tell me, it is not a Slabaugh family Christmas without pierogis, kolache, kielbasa, and Sauerkraut.
Kolache is a flaky firm pastry dough filled with diced pecans, walnuts, and a special brown sugar filling; the dough is heavy, but crispy, and the outside of the pastry is covered with a layer of white baking sugar. It is everyone’s most looked-forward-to part of Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Kolache to me is the familiar laugh of an old aunt, the sound of someone knocking on the front door with their hands full, the crinkle of wrapping paper, the feeling of being lifted through the air into your father’s arms, the nostalgic glow of red, blue, green, and gold string lights, the heart of our family gatherings.
As I grew up, I was accustomed to the fact that kolache took days upon days to create. Why? The ingredients list was particular, to say the least. Yeast cakes, a pound and a half of freshly churned butter (unsalted), whole pecans that you had to mince by hand, a special brand of baker’s sugar, pet milk, condensed milk, and lard to name just a few. Each step of the baking process was performed in exact order like a meticulously organized dance routine. Make one wrong move in measurement or proofing time, and you will have to start from scratch. One must add all the ingredients to a bowl for the dough, let it proof overnight, work it into two large ovals, put it back again to proof, then break it up the third day into small, weighed dough balls to be rolled out to exactly a quarter inch into the sugar mixture. Then you spread the thick, gooey brown sugar nut filling onto the dough, roll it up gingerly like a croissant, shape it into something resembling a horseshoe, and finally bake them to a golden brown. Grandma Slabaugh had it all down to science, and legend has it that in a rush, she could bake a full batch of 60 kolache in a single day. To a seven-year-old, that sounded like a hell of a lot of work, but I figured that one day she would be able to show me each painstaking step to make kolache.
My grandmother was almost eighty at the time and had only fragments of her memory left. Dementia set in for her when I was only five. She responded only to “Momma” and often would repeat her thoughts as short phrases that she would cycle through. “I want to go home!” “Where is Papa?” and “I have three of them…one…two…three.” We never really knew what she had three of. Grandchildren? Was she counting time? My mother liked to say she was thinking of me and my two sisters, one of whom passed away after only three short months in this world. By the time I was nine, her personality deteriorated. She didn’t know where she lived, what her name was, the colors of the rainbow, or even recognize her own seven children. Needless to say, I was less than an afterthought. It was confusing to explain to a nine-year-old, why their Grandma didn’t want to go shopping with her or converse about the world past the fact that she was “sick”; I loved her anyway. Many summer weekdays while my parents worked, I was dropped off with my sister and we spent 9–5’s in the tiny condo she shared with my grandfather, religiously eating bologna sandwiches, going for walks to the community pond, and “making cookies” together, which consisted of putting copper cookie cutters onto a tray and into my sister and I’s shared plastic oven, then serving them to my grandpa, who never failed to pause his baseball game recording—“Try them”—and demand, “SKEEZIX and SCOOTER, GO MAKE ME SOME REAL COOKIES!” A belly shaking laugh ensued.
Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s destroyed my grandmother before I ever got to know who she was as a person. I did know that she had a beautiful smile, gave amazing hugs, and was the best coloring-book partner a girl could have. I remember she took nothing off the tray in 2009, but smiled at everyone else enjoying her famous kolache, her deep brown eyes warm, clouded, and slightly hollow. She passed away three years later from dementia/Alzheimer’s. I was only ten. MygGrandpa passed two years following that from heartbreak. Both of their deaths wrecked my father’s side of the family. I told my fifth-grade class that year that when I grew up, I wanted to find a cure for the disease that took my grandma from me.
In December of 2018, I came home from a boring, typical suburban day of high school just before Christmas break. Opening the front door, I stood in our walkway a beat longer than normal, weighing out what my father’s reaction to my next question would be as I watched his routine sorting of the daily mail. He noticed me standing awkwardly and beat me to it.
“Something on your mind? Or are you just too cold to take your coat off?” He smiled.
I remember wondering silently when his familiar dark goatee had turned gray. I braced. I told my father I wanted to make Grandma’s kolache for Christmas. We hadn’t had any for seven years of holidays since she passed. No one could do her recipe justice, and no one was brave enough to try. His face shifted through a multitude of emotions; excitement, sadness, confusion, and then settled on a deeper level of exhaustion than the typical teenage-daughter-raising fathers possess.
“Okay—” He rubbed the back of his neck, raising his eyebrows. He set down the letter opener. “—but you must find the recipe.”
In her final years, Grandma Slabaugh spent lots of time aimlessly walking around, mumbling to herself and destroying or misplacing her prized recipes. Ironically, I found the original handwritten recipe for Horseshoe Nut Cakes in an old photo album in our basement.
That year, when I brought the dessert tray up from the basement piled high with kolache, snoballs, and sugar cookies, everyone’s eyes filled with tears, and everyone had room for at least “just one” of the delicately filling pastries. I blushed, thinking of the hours my father and I spent attempting to complete each step as accurately as her limited-description recipe card allowed. At one point, we had remade the dough three times and were about to give up entirely. It was a hell of a lot of frustrating work, but passing them out, those who could find words thanked me. I knew they weren’t all perfectly shaped, the nuts probably weren’t chopped thin enough, the filling spilled out of cracks in the dough on many of them, and for some reason, the world stopped making “yeast cakes,” so finding a substitute was a nightmare, but I swelled with pride. Tears pricked the back of my eyes, and my throat constricted with anguish. Biting through that first flaky outer layer of crust brought a rush of emotions. Suddenly I was the seven-year-old girl in the little red dress, with tinsel stuck in her hair, running down the stairs too fast. My father put his arm around me and pressed his lips to the crown of my head.
“Thank you. Your grandma would be so proud of you, you know that?”
I looked around at my uncles and aunts, and they met my gaze with familiar deep warm brown eyes. I thought of her forlorn voice stating that she had three of them…maybe it was kolache after all? The twinkling lights on our same old huge plastic tree blurred, and Christmas carols buzzed in the background of a yule log flickering gently on our flat-screen TV.
Samantha Slabaugh is a 2024 graduating senior at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, pursuing a degree in Professional and Digital Writing with a minor in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction creative writing and digital work has won Writing Excellence Awards at OU, but her main area of focus is poetry. While her passions in life include writing, Samantha also enjoys her job as a social media manager, riding motorcycles, and film photography in her free time..
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