Bread

It seems that there should be more holidays where families bake bread. In Connecticut, my partner’s family bakes bread twice a year, for Thanksgiving and Christmas - loaves and loaves, and they distribute them to their family all over the state. If you come into the kitchen any time from the morning of Christmas eve until several days after Christmas has passed, you’ll smell the sweet, buttery, yeasty fragrance of hand-mixed and kneaded bread. It’s best when they come out of the oven, steaming and hot and round and people will gather around the table, a loaf in one hand and a stick of butter in the other to smother the bread with butter so that tomorrow, when the foil is unwrapped, the bread will have a shiny, almost unreal shine. For breakfast the rule is bread, and everyone eats bread - bread with butter, with jam, toasted or fresh from slicing, and people graze on bread all through cooking the Christmas dinner, opening presents and at the end of the day, when the gifts are piled back under the tree so visitors can see what was given, after the wrapping is bagged and the dinner dishes are washed and the leftovers are all put away, people will come into the living room with a buttered piece of bread, the perfect end to the mostly-but-not-always-completely perfect day.