The Gingerbread Men.
The smell of gingerbread men baking had always reminded her of christmas. Ever since she could remember she would spend christmas eve at her grandparents and she would always spend the afternoon with her grandma, baking and decorating dozens of gingerbread men (and occasionally sneaking one or two whenever her grandma wasn’t looking). The house would always end up filled with laughter and the smell of baking gingerbread.
Whilst they would bake they would talk, she would tell her grandma about school, her classes, her friends, her extra-curricular activities. In return her grandma would tell her about her life, about the places she’d been and the things she’d done. Her favourite stories were the ones that her grandma would tell her about being part of the Land Girls in the second world war.
As she got older she’d confide more and more in her grandma, like when all the other girls in her year started becoming interested in boys and she just didn’t see what all the fuss was “honestly grandma, they’re just smelly, annoying, and stupid,” and a few years later when she hesitantly confided that she did have a crush on someone, a girl from the year above who was on the same football team as her.
When she moved away to go to university her grandma gifted her a recipe book, her own old and battered one, with the recipe for gingerbread men identifiable purely because it’s pages wer.e the oldest and most battered. It quickly became her most treasured possession and for several years she continued to make gingerbread men on christmas eve. At least until the first christmas after her Grandma’s death. Then it became too painful even to look at the recipe book and it got moved in to a hardly used drawer in the kitchen.
It wasn’t until years later, when she was first moving in with the woman she would one day call her wife, that the recipe book was rediscovered. That year there were once again two pairs of hands making gingerbread men on christmas eve whilst stories were exchanged and she proceeded to tell her future wife all the stories about her grandma’s life
A Place of Mine 