1. You offer to bring something to your in-laws for dinner. You’re offering to bring something for the woman who could out-cook anyone you know. Regardless, you insist on bringing something.
2. Your assignment? Bread.
3. You decide on frozen bread dough. At 36 rolls to a bag, you get two bags and throw them in the freezer.
4. You turn your focus to the Christmas Eve dinner you are hosting in your own home in a few short days. Your sons requested homemade chicken and noodles – your mother’s recipe. Your heart warms at the thought that a little bit of your mother will be “here” for Christmas. You are set, all the ingredients are bought and at the ready.
5. Christmas Eve arrives. At noon, you clear every available surface space in your kitchen. You are about to create magic. The noodles! The mashed potatoes! The chicken!
6. And, oh yes, the rolls. You remember them, and remember too late, that they are frozen solid.
7. You’ll need to manage the raising of 72 neglected rolls while prepping dinner at the same time. According to the bag, you need 3-5 hours to thaw the rolls.
8. It’ll have to take 3.
9. Your kitchen becomes a harrowing combination of frozen balls, boiling water, and long hair falling out of cheap butterfly clips from Target.
10. You put the first bag of rolls into 2 pans. You even think to wait an extra 40 minutes to open Bag 2. Brilliant indeed. They will peak at the most opportune moment – just as you are pulling out the last pan of Bag 1.
11. Wrong.
12. You manage to coax the first 36 rolls to life. They grow, like a bad idea, to the perfect size. You bake them to a golden hue you can just barely see. Each one is a chewy bite of diet-destroying goodness, just as the holidays call for. You close your eyes in pride, and breathe a sigh of relief.
13. Your sons eat a dozen unapproved rolls.
14. You shriek.
15. But it’s fine, it’s Christmas. You regain your composure, but inside you are trying to calculate how many rolls are needed to feed 6 tonight and 10 tomorrow, and if they will eat like people or like your children.
16. That’s when you notice that Bag 2 rolls are having trouble warming up to each other in that tiny, old pan you crammed them into.
17. You load the pans of tiny uncooperative balls into the oven. You stare at them, you turn on the little oven light and you go on patrol.
18. No matter how many times you look, they are refusing to get golden. You add another two minutes to the timer.
19. You are running out of time, you must start the noodles! You pretend what’s happening in the oven is not happening. When the timer goes off, your hands are covered in egg mixture, and you figure another minute won’t hurt, right?
20. Wrong.
21. Your youngest son comes by and pokes one of the rocks fresh from the oven with his finger.
22. “Save the lightly cooked ones for me,” he says.
23. “You mean the ones you ALREADY ATE?” I ask. Mrs. Claus goes dark at some point during every Christmas, and the moment has arrived.
24. You regroup and take joy in remembering your mother – watching her roll her homemade noodles on your family’s kitchen table some 30 years ago. You remember her advice: Roll them thin. Lots of flour. Don’t slice them too thick.
25. You’re trying to be nostalgic, but instead you roll, flour and flip those noodles like the bread-bereft chef that you are. You’re rough with them, and you hope Santa is not, indeed, watching.
26. Finally, with your in-laws coming for your dinner at any moment, you pull the chicken out of the boiling pot and put your badly bruised noodles into the broth. Your husband offers to mash the potatoes and your sons dare not mention the rolls again.
27. In the end, the noodles recover. They come out perfect, just like your mother’s. You are pleased. They are delicious. Your Christmas Eve dinner is a success.
28. Your rolls are not.
29. You bring them to your MIL’s dinner the next day without a word. They are served. No one comments. The rest of the meal is perfect.
30. You suspect that next year, your MIL won’t ask you to bring a thing. You suspect that next year, you won’t insist upon it either.