The house smells of toasted pecans and butter. Outside, the sky hangs heavy and gray with cold \u2013 perfect for baking in a warm, well-lit kitchen. In one hour, I will leave to pick up my son from preschool and I will carry his wheelchair and his then-five-year-old self up the stairs and into this homey scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cookies are nothing special,\u201d I will say if anyone asks \u2013 my polite way of not giving away the recipe. It\u2019s been in the family for generations, originating with my grandmother who refused to use a food processor to dice the nuts into tiny minced bits. She toasted and then sliced every one by hand. If she were still alive, she\u2019d pretend not to see the bags of pre-chopped extra fine pecans I\u2019ve stashed in my pantry behind the olive oil. But my son doesn\u2019t know the difference.<\/p>\n

Thumbprint cookies are a universal treat and everybody has their own version. Nuts or no. Sweet or buttery. Chocolate, jam, lemon curd, or icing in the little doughy center. It\u2019s a particular palate pattern that\u2019s just as good as any Myers-Briggs test to define a person.<\/p>\n

The family recipe is written in green in my grandmother\u2019s looping cursive in the upper left-hand corner of a Methodist church cookbook that has long lost its cover. This single stained page is now protected in the confines of a lime green binder that is my mishmash of \u201cfamily recipes,\u201d i.e. the ones you can\u2019t pin on Pinterest.<\/p>\n

As a child, the thumbprinting was my job. I would stand on a stool next to my mother, who rolled out the sticky dough with buttered hands, placing the perfect-sized mounds in parallel lines down the baking sheet. I would stick one thumb straight down and wiggle it around a little (at age eight, your thumbs are still too small to make a decent divot without a little wiggling) and then we\u2019d slide them in the oven and wait. A low and slow bake was the key to success.<\/p>\n

The cookies themselves are incredibly simple and come out pale and just a little gold on the edges. They are buttery with something sweet underneath \u2013 the powdered sugared kiss at the end. You could eat them plain with a good cup of coffee, but it would leave the little indentation in the center bereft.<\/p>\n

I use spray-can icing because it\u2019s my son\u2019s favorite and I am forever subject to his taste profile. However, I\u2019ve found it suits just about anybody. Yellow for spring. Blue for birthdays. White for wedding showers. They are the cookie for all occasions. Today they will be red and green. Today we are celebrating the holidays in his particular way. He\u2019s never cared about the twinkle lights or the\u00a0caroling or even the presents. These cookies are Christmas for him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

By the time we get back from school today, they will be cooled just enough to ice and eat. He will get the inaugural bite. This is how I sneak into his world \u2013 a world of limited language and foods which has been a slow experiment in itself.<\/p>\n

If left to his own devices, he tends to eat everything like a baby bird, swallowing it whole so you can see it slide down his gullet. \u201cCrunch, crunch, crunch,\u201d I would say in feeding therapy while he practiced gnawing on a Gerber cookie or Cheerio.<\/p>\n

These cookies were the first homemade food he learned to love. Seeing my grandmother\u2019s scrawled handwriting in my mind\u2019s-eye, I would bake them from memory and then we would sit at his tray and eat them together. They were the way to his little boy-heart. From the first slightly soft and crunchy bite, he would grin and chomp and I would clap and lick icing off my fingers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore,\u201d he would sign, until neither of us could possibly stomach another.<\/p>\n

On this chilly afternoon as I crouch by the oven and watch the rounded edges take on their ochre glow, I can already see the evening unfold. He will laugh when I roll him past the cookies lined up like dominoes on the counter and he will clap at the first \u201cpop!\u201d of the icing spurting into the sink where I practice a squirt or two. Then he will not wait until I\u2019ve finished more than one before wheeling over and holding out a hand. We will ice and eat and ice and eat until our tongues are red and green. This is how our two worlds, so often separated by silence, will come together.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Parent.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The house smells of toasted pecans and butter. Outside, the sky hangs heavy and gray with cold \u2013 perfect for baking in a warm, well-lit kitchen. In one hour, I will leave to pick up my son from preschool and I will carry his wheelchair and his then-five-year-old self up the stairs and into this homey scene. \u201cThe cookies are nothing special,\u201d I will say if anyone asks \u2013 my polite way of not giving …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[21,23,11,26],"tags":[428,28,97,46,176,34,48,209,55,136,63,54,17,84,100,15,64,37,49],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/christmas-cookies-2803652_1920.jpg?fit=1920%2C1440&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ca5p-13P","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4081"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4122,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4081\/revisions\/4122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}