I wanted "5 Golden Rings" to be a story about the 3rd ring Barry ever gave me. Imagine my surprise when I opened my jewelry box to find no emerald ring! Hopefully it will show up at some point, and I'll write that story then. In the meantime, the "5 Golden Rings" will be cookies. What's Christmas without cookies?!
[First published on Facebook, December 26, 2018] Note: Formatting is best when viewed portrait / up-and-down like this 📲
Pinwheels are a cookie from my childhood...that texture, the crispness of that first bite brought me back to my Grandma's house in Toano, Virginia. However, she always rolled hers with the white on the outside--oops, mine are reversed!
Grandma displayed them on a tray, striped with rows of tiny cookies, sized so you could have one of each--pinwheels, tiny chocolate chip cookies, and squares of 
perfectly-formed 7-layer bars with pecans from the tree in their backyard. Papa Kenny would ask if I wanted another; I was always sitting just to his right. When I looked at my parent's approval and they shook their heads "no," Papa would put an extra on his plate (and later slide it surreptitiously onto mine).
On Christmas evening, my father told me a story about pinwheels from his childhood. He asked, "When you rolled up your dough, 
were the ends very even, when you wrapped them up in the waxed paper?"
I responded that I had made them pretty even and that they were nearly squared-off. Then, he 
explained that his grandmother's and his mother's were never even, when they went to slice the chilled dough! That's because he and his sisters would pinch pieces of the dough out of the twisted ends of the roll, while the dough was supposed to be chilling. That bite on the end always tasted the best, he explained.
The next day, I mentioned pinwheel dough to his sister, my Aunt Willie, and I mentioned that Dad had asked whether my ends 
were neatly squared-off. She interrupted me before I could get the words out of my mouth...she knew exactly where I was going with this. Such a tasty memory...how evocative words, sights, smells, and texture can be during the holidays!
#Christmas2018