Memories so sweet:
Daddy baking cookies from
Fam’ly recipe.
Hungarian treat:
Flaky, sugared, golden dough
Stuffed with hickory nuts.
Each year at Christmas,
In kitchen warm and cozy –
Memories so sweet.
For decades, my dad (who was Bulgarian/Polish) baked Hungarian cookies. It was a recipe handed down from one Balkan country to another, and was a favorite of our family. However, in the last several years of my dad’s life, Christmas season included so many other activities as well that sometimes he just didn’t have time to bake those cookies along with everything else. When those years came along, he baked them for me on my birthday instead, which is February 1st. So it’s right that I’m thinking about them in February this year. I can almost taste them even now.
POETRY BY AHYOKA 