My family spent a lot of time this holiday season thinking about memories of holidays past. What made things memorable, what things did we hold on to so many years later, was it happiness? Was it disappointment? And if so, why? I have been thinking a lot about this lately and one thing my mother said to me that she remembered from Christmas in her childhood very fondly was when she made things for her entire family. How the act of sitting down and applying oneself entirely to doing something that you just want to do because it would make your family happy. I think that is a good reason to look back on Christmas or whatever holiday is being celebrated during this cold winter season where family keeps us warm and happy; to celebrate not because we feel obligated and tied to disappointment or the gratification of materialistic desires, but the  celebration of loving for the sake of loving. Because they are family, because they are not perfect, and because they are our blood, our flesh, and from them we find meaning.

I realized I do not often give without reason and I really would like to change that about myself. I thought it would be fun to start small, kind of like my mother did in her memory of her early Christmas, by making something for my family to enjoy. What better way to make something they would enjoy than by starting where everyone ends on Christmas? With desserts. I found a nifty little picture on the internet of a little strawberry Santa and decided that would be a great little present to make for Christmas Eve dinner. The website, Operation Santa Claus, had a bunch of fun little Christmasy things to do, but I decided on these cute little bite sized desserts to share with my family.

I took these Santa strawberries to be easier than they actually were at first sight and my adventure in making these began as most attempts to re-create something found on the internet do, with failure. I tried to use just whipped cream as the filling for the strawberries and very quickly realized the error of my ways as they began to deflate, melt, and deform into little haphazard Santas, slightly off kilter and very unappetizing to behold.

The ones on the left side of the photograph are the initial attempts and the right are the later more successful attempts. I realized that the filling had to be sturdier so we made a cheesecake like filling made simply from cream cheese, powder sugar, and a dash of half and half to thin the mixture enough to be piped. Now, with the successful mixture (in a plastic bag used for piping) the strawberries were cut and filled and dressed to look like Santa Claus. The final touch being the sprinkles for little eyes on the cute little bite sized desserts.

They were cute, small, tasty, and a sweet way to end Christmas Eve. It was a good way to give back to my family in a very tiny way that built up our family instead of building materialistic gratification. I wonder if I will look back years from now and remember this fondly as my Christmas memory…