Grandma's kitchen, 2009: Computer-assisted Christmas cookies

One of these days, e-mail will be an ancient form, and people like me will be left in the dust again. I love e-mail, but I know I'm way behind the curve in electronic communication. I have a Facebook account that one of our daughters set up for me last Christmas. I check it every week or two. I learned to text at the insistence of our 15-year-old granddaughter, who lives completely in the new electronic world.

But I don't know from Tweet. I don't own an iPod and Kindle is about starting a fire. Isn't it?

So just when did this happen -- when did it transpire that a person who uses a laptop and e-mail is on the verge of being out of date? While the earth twirls on and the folks out at Google announce more whiz-bang technology, I am here in my kitchen wearing an apron and mixing up my mom's recipes for Christmas cookies.

An apron, already. Another ancient practice, pulling on an apron. Aprons are older even than e-mail.

These recipes -- two of them, one using sour cream and one using molasses -- are the kind of dough that stiffens up in the fridge for several hours, or overnight. Then I roll it out into stars, bells, holly, Santas and my favorite -- a rocking horse.

That horse is tricky. The dough needs to be just the right stiffness, and my sweeps with the rolling pin need to be swift, but the horse is the most fun to decorate, which comes next. I make powdered sugar frosting, divide it into small cups and add food coloring: red, yellow, blue, green. Then I spread the frosting on the cookies -- sometimes using a cookie decorator.

Now, there's another almost obsolete item. I went on eBay a couple of years ago to find a small replacement part for my cookie decorator. I had to buy a whole set, of course, but it was worth it for this small piece that I use to squeeze out the frosting for the mane and saddle on the horse, and to trim up its tail. Red and green sprinkles and nonpariels add the final touch.

Nonpariels! Yet another artifact. Tiny colored candy balls I've used for years for decorating, but I don't have a clue where their name comes from. I'll bet Google can tell me. My laptop is handy right here in the kitchen.

Let's see -- nonpareil comes from the French and has myriad meanings, all superlatives. A chocolate company in Vermont will sell me nonpareil chocolates. Wikipedia tells me that they're also called "hundreds of thousands" and I'm curious about this Australia-New Zealand reference so I click on that.

This is what it has come to: I sit in my kitchen, making cookies with the help of utensils I bought on the Internet, able to research arcane questions of language and culture on a whim, the accumulated knowledge of the world at my fingertips while I wait for the cookies to bake.

And this is supposed to be obsolescence.

Marilyn Heltzer is a writer and blogger in rural Beltrami County. This is adapted from a blog post she wrote for the Bemidji Pioneer.

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