A Gen X Feminist Mom’s Approach to Holiday Greetings
Holiday staples and folded
By Melanie Haupt, Fri., Dec. 22, 2023
As a Gen X feminist, it’s in my contract to be into zines. I’ve always been fascinated with them as both a form of punk media and a pre-internet democratic form of creative and political expression. Back in my wilder, woolier single days, I published a feminist zine, the name of which I won’t share here because it’s too embarrassing. I was deeply interested in exploring, through art and literature, how women in the late 1990s were expected to look, sound, and behave.
I would spend hours cutting and pasting (literally) photos, poems, essays, and drawings onto folded 8½-by-11-inch pieces of paper, figuring out how to arrange the pages before sending them through the copier at Kinko's, and feeling the deep satisfaction of stapling the spines with a long-arm stapler. I sold copies for $3 each; pretty sure I cleared about $9 on the zine's six-issue run.
Fast-forward out of the Nineties to, say, 2010: I'm married, a mom to two younglings, and a graduate student writing a dissertation on women's food writing. I'm very interested in cooking as a pastime and to feed my family, and in how women communicate complex ideas and political stances through narratives of food. At the same time, I'm receiving an onslaught of holiday cards each year with photos and letters regaling their interlocutors with stories of precocious toddlers and fabulous vacations both foreign and domestic.
These cards made me twitch. What I believed to be their smug self-satisfaction annoyed me. I was also bored with sending mass-manufactured, generic greeting cards with photos of the kids (printed at Costco) to far-flung relations I'd only met at our wedding. I wanted to do something unique and creative, something that provided a snapshot of what our life was really like, not just a catalog of cool shit we did (or didn't do) over the course of a year. I decided to do a very exclusive handmade holiday greeting, one that only 25 people would receive: a recipe zine featuring our family's favorite recipes from the year, along with very crude drawings by yours truly.
I made a 16-page zine (page numbers need to be divisible by 4), including the cover page, with a table of contents and a brief holiday greeting. I included 5 recipes, including curried pea dip, which had been a huge hit at our Easter brunch that year; Smitten Kitchen's "Martha's mac & cheese," which I don't recommend writing out by hand using a Sharpie because it's a very long recipe; parmesan-crusted chicken tenders; and lemon bars (also from Smitten Kitchen; I prefer the thick version with more lemon curd).
Those recipes provided a snapshot of what was in rotation in 2012, and they make me smile. The pea dip reminds me of having a house full of friends and their children, who rampaged through our backyard in search of plastic eggs filled with trinkets and candy. I think about how many times I've made that mac & cheese for new moms and for holiday dinners and potlucks. I make the lemon bars at least once a year, and have noticed how the weather affects their texture and consistency. I can trace the trajectory of my family and the phases of our lives based on the recipes in the annual holiday recipe zines, the most recent edition of which was in 2019.
Maybe I'll make one this year, which has seen many transitions. My son graduated from high school and is now a freshman in college, and my daughter is a freshman in high school with a very busy schedule. My spouse and I both work demanding jobs that leave us both too gassed for scratch cooking. There's a lot of bagged salad and spaghetti with jarred sauce on the dinner table these days.
If I were to make a recipe zine that reflected this year, though, it would include toasted Costco bagels with cream cheese for those 6am swim team practice mornings; fettuccine alfredo, my daughter's favorite; sheet pan chicken fajitas, a frequent request from my spouse; and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, my son's favorite; I left a tub of them on his dorm room desk when we dropped him off at school in August. And, of course, taking a page from Feed the Resistance, one of my favorite cookbooks, the zine would include a recipe for the chocolate-chip banana bread I made for a bake sale to raise money for reproductive justice organizations.
I'd still handwrite out all the recipes, as I think there's something impersonal in typing content like this. In the past, my work has been kind of informal (some might say sloppy), so I have now started using a ruler to create lines on the pages, and I write out everything in pencil before tracing over it with a Sharpie or a Micron pen. (But I do leave light palimpsests of things I erased; I always like to bake in a few little imperfections.) Some pages are jazzier than others – sometimes they just have text, sometimes I'll doodle a related image in the margins like a medieval illuminated manuscript.
I'd have my daughter, a tremendously talented artist, illustrate the zine with images of those cookies and tacos alongside renderings of FaceTime calls with our son, ensconced in his dorm room more than 2,000 miles away, and a picture of a swim parka donned at 5am, before the chickens are even awake. And maybe a stylized uterus ringed by the words "Come and Take It." These are the recipes I would choose to represent the joy, pride, sadness, exhaustion, gratitude, and anger that have characterized 2023.
What will your recipes represent?
