When I was little my mom had a spiral notebook with a dark red cover, otherwise known as her recipe book. She'd write down recipes she'd seen or clip recipes from newspapers and tape them on the pages. I loved that cookbook. I'd sit there next to her while she cooked and write letters on the front of the book in pen. Now, when I say letters I literally mean letters "A, B, C", etc. Of course there was no pattern to them. I remember a big "A" and a big "G" somewhere on the front. At some point in time I decided to draw a line and connect all of those letters. My mom was so "lucky" to have me as a helper. But she never replaced that notebook. Even in my 20s that cookbook was still used by my mother.
There was a red velvet cake recipe in that notebook that my mom and I used to cook. When I got married I wanted to cook a red velvet cake for the holidays, so I copied the recipe on an index card and put it in the recipe box my mom had given me.
My mom planned on giving that notebook/cookbook to me so that I could have it when I started cooking with my children. But I never got that notebook. It disappeared in the wind like everything else from my childhood last year.
But somehow when the rubble on top of our kitchen was removed someone found my recipe box. The top of the box was gone, presumably ripped apart by the wind. But there, tightly packed inside, remained all of my recipes, including the red velvet recipe I'd copied from that red notebook.
So today, on my daughter's first Christmas Eve, I cooked that red velvet cake with the homemade cream cheese icing, and I gave her a few little crumbs from it. While I'll never get to cook with her from that little red notebook, at least I lived to give birth to her and feed her cake from a recipe from that book. It's little moments like those that remind me that while the tornado will find ways to knock me down God will always make ways to pick me up.
Happy Birthday Jesus.
And thank you for the memories you gave me today.
