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National Pastry Day 2023
Now THAT’S what I’m talking about! Today is National Pastry Day.
Avenues
The great thing about pastry is there are so many avenues – it’s very hard to get bored doing this. ~Adriano Zumbo
One of the best things about the holidays is the plethora of tasty treats: cookies of all kinds, plum pudding, fruitcake, pizzelles, marzipan and so forth.
Traditionally, some of the splurging that went with the holiday season was a question of using up ingredients before they went bad.
Another purpose was to bulk up a bit to help survive the winter and to warm up the house by keeping the hearth fire busy with baking and roasting holiday fare.
Certainly, one of the things I like about 🍂Autumn🍂 and ❄️ Winter ❄️ is that I can use the oven without censure.
In hotter times, I get complaints about heating up an already sweltering house in pursuit of dinner. In my preferred seasons, it’s beneficial.
The intersection of cozy warmth and the wondrous variety of holiday treats is the very heart of hygge.
Who could ask for anything more?
Mmm, Pastries
3 Ingredient Puff Pastry Desserts | Easy Christmas Recipes
As much as I love basic Christmas cookies, these puff pastry treats look fantastic. I love how creative people get with their ingredients.
There’s a place for every flavor and texture a pastry chef can put together. The puff pastry treats in the video remind me of my mom’s Thimble Cookies.
The secret to mom’s cookies was the egg white glaze and the currant jelly. These things were so delicate and dainty. They were a family favorite, so I had to make sure I got my stash before we had guests. They wouldn’t last long with company around.
One of the best parts of the holidays when I was growing up was putting the Bing Crosby Christmas album on the record player and helping with the many batches of cookies we’d make.
Mom had an enormous cylindrical Tupperware container that we’d fill with chocolate chip cookies. Me, oh my. A handful of chocolate chip cookies and a mug of eggnog was a great way to end a schoolday.
Another fantastic treat was making gingerbread men after school with Mom and my sister, Karen. Cut-out cookies, peanut butter cookies with the fork cross-hatching on top, coconut date balls and gooey oatmeal cookies with raisins in the mix.
The holidays were so sumptuous, I can still taste it. I can’t indulge like I used to, but Kelly kindly bakes a batch or two to jingle my holiday bells.
Middleman
I never know what I’m going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I’m just the middleman. ~Peter Max
That’s pretty much how I write. I will say it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say ‘never‘, though. I have a basic idea to start from, but that’s all.
For instance, I started Carol’s Christmas with the basic notion of using a motif from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
A classic romance trope is the love triangle, so I took the idea of the Ghost of Christmas Past/Present/Yet-To-Come and gave Carol a love quadrangle.
That’s basically all I had when I started the story this year. Instead of “A Christmas Carol“, it’s Carol’s Christmas and she’s got the boyfriends of past/present/future.
As with the Spirit of Christmas Yet-To-Come, the question is whether it is a future that will happen or a future that might happen only.
Using that dynamic, we’ve got Carol’s encounters with her ex-boyfriend, Ryan (Boyfriend of Christmas Past), her current guy, Nathan (Boyfriend of Christmas Present), and Paul (Boyfriend of Christmas Future?).
Taking from the Hallmark Channel movie template, it’s a given that the main character or female lead should be an uptight professional with an equally uptight male counterpart. In this template, the uptight male counterpart gets kicked to the curb in favor of the rugged, small town flannel bro who helps the uptight female lead loosen up and enjoy the holidays again.
I don’t know that I necessarily planned to subvert that trope, but rather dance around it a bit.
As Hallmark has their cute country settings, my stories have a few settings established. The first entry, A Misfit Christmas, takes place in Empire City. As a story that takes place in The Sentinelsverse, that seemed the appropriate place to start.
The next year, I had All 🍪 I 🍪 Want take place in the more Hallmarkian town of Laurel Ridge. Laurel Ridge is a kind of hodgepodge of the places I’ve lived. It’s a generic, rural Pennsylvania town. Actually, since it’s in The Sentinelsverse it’s a generic, rural Pennswald town. In my timeline, Pennsylvania was renamed to Pennswald by referendum in the face of heavy German immigration.
Because of Jeb’s interaction with Frank, I decided to set Holly and Ivy in Wyoming Pass. Frank is the guy who Jeb pulled out of the snow on his way to deliver the bear sculpture. Wyoming Pass is more like the greater Wilkes-Barre and Scranton region in my literary universe. As a sequel to Holly and Ivy, Merry 🔔 Bells also took place in Wyoming Pass.
Why did I do this? Because Kelly said she wanted a follow-up story about Ivy and Ian’s wedding. That’s what it takes. A seed of an idea to get the story rolling.
So, what are the seeds so far?
A Misfit Christmas: The ‘We’re Just A Couple Of Misfits‘ song from Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer was the primary inspiration for the first story. I made my misfits into a short guy named Bryce who resells photography stuff online and an unusually tall aspiring dancer named Veronica. This unlikely couple is drawn together when a supervillain who had been running a Twelve Days of Christmas themed crime spree for the previous eight years switches from seasonal mayhem to actual murder. Sentinels founding member superhero, Mary Christmas, is assigned as Veronica’s bodyguard until Krampus can be brought to heel. Veronica’s home town of Plattsboro in upstate New York serves as the Hallmarkian rural town setting for part of the story.
All 🍪 I 🍪 Want: It’s not Christmas until you hear Mariah Carey belting out this classic tune or until you hear its bluesier counterpart. All I want for Christmas is Kelly, but I also want a sweet batch of freshly baked cookies. So, this was my point of departure for Jeb’s story. He’s a guy who just wants a decent batch of freshly baked Christmas cookies. Who better to bake them than his childhood heartthrob, Aundrea, who happens to own the town’s bakery. Just to spice things up, I figured I’d add a love triangle. All Trilby wanted for Christmas was Jeb. Put it in the Hallmarkian small town of Laurel Ridge and watch what happens. Since it takes place in The Sentinelsverse, it turns out that Jeb got super strength when he went to Empire City to surprise Aundrea at her culinary school. He arrived during an incursion of Chaosians and never got to catch up with Aundrea in the city. When Aundrea graduated, she got her seed money for the bakery from an insidious supervillain named Hellion, who was still extorting a percentage of her annual income at the time of the story.
Holly and Ivy: Since Jeb rescued some random guy from being stuck in the snow in the previous book, I figured I’d explore how a random act of kindness by an unregistered super would impact an innocent bystander. That’s all I had. The Holly and The Ivy is one of my favorite Christmas carols, so that gave me the idea for Frank’s wife, Holly, and his sister-in-law, Ivy. ‘The holly bears the crown‘ told me Frank’s wife would be a prickly prima donna. If you listen to the song, you realize that even though it’s called The Holly and the Ivy and Ivy is in the refrain, the song only ever talks about Holly and its properties. This seemed like a great inspiration for the dynamic between the two sisters. Add a dash of Hallmarkian professional lady meets a flannel bro in a sleepy town during the holidays, and we’re off to the races. As with all Holiday Season Serial Romances, there had to be some intersection with The Sentinels. Dustin, a teenage super who is the protégé of Slipstream, thwarts the insidious plans of the Krampus Gang.
Merry 🔔 Bells: A sequel to Holly and Ivy where Ian and Ivy get married and (as Andy Williams says) the merry bells keep ringing. Two wedding guests meet and fall in love. Kelly wanted a story about the wedding, so I added some characters as stand-ins for how Kelly and I met at a friend’s wedding and have been inseparable ever since. Toby and Meredith are not direct personal inserts, but Kelly and I are both huge nerds with a lot of interests in common. Unlike Meredith and Toby, Kelly does not enjoy shawarma spices in her meatloaf. Being that Toby and Meredith are both massive Sentinels fans, Slipstream pays them a visit to encourage them not to blow Dustin’s cover story from the year before.
Carol’s Christmas: Riffing on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to up the ante on a Hallmarkian love triangle story, I returned to Laurel Ridge where Carol is a local event planner. She’s organizing this year’s Jingle Bell Jubilee. In Hallmark fashion, she’s a little too busy being busy to be bothered with a love life until it starts poking its way in. The reappearance of her ex-boyfriend, Ryan, from years ago rekindles feelings. Her platonic relationship with Nathan is set in sharp relief against the earth-shaking kiss under the mistletoe from guest celebrity superhero, Megaman of The Sentinels. While the holidays get into full swing, Carol gets more than a case of mixed feelings.
Next year? Who knows? I’m not even done with this year.
The point is, given those basic points of departure, I play it out in my head and record what I see. Like the quote above says, I’m the middleman.
I can’t say that I start from nothing, but I suppose it’s partially true. I start from nothing but a desire to tell a story. Oh? What’s it about? Dunno. Guess I’ll poke around for some inspiration. Maybe a song. Maybe a notion. Maybe a sequel to something I already wrote.
That’s how I do it. Some people call that being a “pantser”. Mostly, I am. I’ve stepped off of that a bit. In the interest of actually finishing a story, I pick a point of departure and a vague notion of where I expect to arrive. I let that simmer in my subconscious a while and transcribe what that winds up showing me.
It’s as simple as that.
That’s all for today. I hope you’re enjoying the holidays. That’s what they’re for.