Chocolate Fudge for the Holidays, a drabble of the Aunt Family

[aldersprig]

Evangaline was making chocolate fudge for the high school holiday bake sale.

In a normal house, in a normal family, this would be a nice, sane, normal activity.

In a normal house she probably wouldn't be using her great-grandmother's recipe, written out on an old index card, likely by her grandmother or her mother. Or she might, but she might not be using her great-great-aunt's measuring spoons, the ones that had a tendency to yell at you when you were going to put in too much of just about anything.

And if she hadn't been using her great-grandmother's recipe, she wouldn't have been grinding cinnamon sticks and dried cayenne peppers by hand, nor what she have been putting in a tiny drop of devil's tears or the shake of pixie dust.

Her family's fudge always sold out, no matter how many trays they made. "It just makes the holidays more magical," Mrs. Steinberg down the street liked to say, with a wink and a laugh that suggested she, too, kept her great-grandmother's recipes wrapped in silk and boxed in ivory and ironwood.

Evangaline always made sure to get an extra helping of Mrs. Steinberg's chocolate babka, too. It made the holidays feel... proper.

And maybe a little bit more magical.

Comments

[clare_dragonfly]

Hee! I bet it does :D

[aldersprig]

:-D

I want their recipes. And Spice cabinet.

[thnidu]

My heritage recipes aren't nearly so interesting, but I can tell my mother's handwriting from my grandmother's. But of course, there are plenty of ways in which the Aunt Family is different from almost everybody else's.

(Drat, I need a "pen" icon that isn't the "editor's friend", for posts and comments about writing.)

[aldersprig]

I can tell mine, too, although sometimes I can't tell my mom's handwriting from my own.

The one amusing thing for me is that the Aunt Family lives on my family estate: the Aunt House is on my great-aunt Margaret's old farm, the family estate is my grandma's place, Beryl's family lives over where my second cousin lived, and so on. They attend church at the church my family goes to.

...but my family doesn't have any literal demons...

Oh, you may find this interesting.

I learned recently that my grandfather had a summer job breaking stone for the roads in that area when he was young: Whittier, Hubble, Dewey, Washington (the outlier), Euler...

[thnidu]

:-)