Traditions (Santa Cookies)
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Unfold the stiff yellowed recipe in your mom’s handwriting from the box of the vintage icing gun
Blend the shortening you don’t use for anything else with bleached flour you don’t use for anything else
because this is tradition, and you’ve tried it other ways and though they are your own they don’t take you back
to the warm crowded kitchen with grandma and mom and your sisters.
Pat the cold dough into the vintage plastic mold filled with the chemicals they don’t put in plastics anymore
Dust, roll, press, pat release onto the baking sheet.
Paint the faces in the specific order designed to avoid red sugar sprinkles in the icing eyebrows
Give them away to everyone you care about.
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A Picture and a Poem 