Holiday Cookies Recipe for the Anxious and Depressed

Don't try this at home

The song below makes a nice soundtrack for reading this piece.

A few years ago, I came up with a holiday cookie recipe to match the mood I was in at the time. The mood? Silly and sad. Carbo-crazed and sleepy.

This bit of creative non-fiction will hopefully make the darkest days of the year (for us Northern Hemisphere residents) a little bit brighter.

I found a nice Jazzy instrumental on Spotify titled “Holiday Cookies” (above) that, depending on your reading speed, should make for an ideal reading soundtrack. Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 1 cup unbleached sadness

• ½ cup confidence, ground down until it becomes an unrecognizable powder

• ⅔ cup rumination, shaken vigorously the night before for 6-8 sleepless hours

• 2 heaping handfuls of unrealized goals, crushed

• 1 ½ cups water, or pillow-soaked tears for a denser cookie

• 3 tablespoons salt, extracted from above tears

• 4 foil packets Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts, taken from supply in nightstand drawer beside bed, crumbled

• 4-10 sticks butter, to taste

• 1 pint Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, to keep you nourished during the making of this recipe

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract because it reminds you of Grandma, and she was the only one who loved you unconditionally

Optional

• One teaspoon chopped ancho chili pepper, to surface your inner pain

• Raisins, because you always think they're chocolate chips and they perfectly symbolize that familiar feeling of disappointment

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Resist the urge to stick your head inside to test for proper temperature.

Combine the avoidance ingredients into a large bowl; or just put them wherever you want. After all, you’re going to do what you want anyway.

In a second bowl, mix together the bitterness with the resentment, until it starts to resemble righteous indignation.

Fold all the ingredients together, alternating between apathy and blame until it takes on a frothy, foamy consistency.

Scoop tablespoons of mixture onto an un-oiled baking pan, preferably one with burned bits of cookie stuck to the surface from the last time you forced yourself to participate in a traditional social experience. Place pan in oven.

Set the timer for 9 minutes—then walk away without hitting start.

Collapse onto couch feeling exhausted, but vaguely proud of yourself.

Jump up suddenly from your quick nap due to burning smell. Race to the kitchen and fling open oven, allowing smoke to fill the room. Instinctively pull pan from baking rack before putting on oven mitts. Fling pan in air in reaction to the burning of the tips of your fingers. Watch as charred cookies spin and tumble on their way to the unwashed tile floor.

Call yourself a fucking idiot at least a dozen times as you run cold water over your hands, then slowly sink to the ground.

Pluck a blackened cookie bit from the floor next to you and crunch on it slowly, savoring all the unrealized potential.

Reach over and pet the dog, who is now sitting across from you, drooling. Find a less burnt morsel, blow on it, place it in your palm, and watch as Rex sloppily gobbles it up. Pick up another and feed it to Rex again.

Laugh, like you haven’t in weeks, at the sight of Rex’s confused face as he tries to reconcile the unpleasant charred flavor with the sugary goodness.

Say “no more” when he begs for more cookie but give him one more anyway because he’s so damn cute.

Work up the courage, strength, and motivation to stand back up, find another baking pan, spray a thick layer of Canola oil onto it, ladle on new scoops of batter from the large mixing bowl, place tray in oven, set the timer for 9 minutes, hit start, and then scrupulously watch as it counts down to zero.