There is little good in any Christmas cookie except the thought behind it. This may be doubly true for Swedish ginger cookies, a recipe that I have cherished for years, but I often feel it should come with a special warning. The principal ingredient in a batch of Swedish ginger cookies -- the one that really does the trick -- is three-quarters of a cup of bacon fat. You can never be too certain these days about what people will allow themselves to enjoy. Their ideas about what is good for them may be circumscribed by their upbringing, their religion or their proximity to a pig. However, I suspect that the Swedish cook who came up with this recipe was simply hemmed in by her larder. She had a pan of drippings and some extra sugar and spices, and she made a thin, brown cookie that tasted sweetly of smoke.

In Coshocton, Ohio, where I am from, lard, suet and drippings were as integral to Christmas as the Episcopal hymnal. My family did not come from Sweden. They were Poles and Ukrainians by way of St. Louis and Cleveland, at least on my father's side. My mother's people were all from the East and had been for several generations, and I think she considered it her moral duty to save my brother and me from falling into the uncouth habits of our paternal grandparents, whom we adored. One way she did that was with the food she served. We grew up on hollandaise sauce, blueberry buckle, succotash, Welsh rabbit, chicken country captain and fresh strawberry pie, whose secret was a thin layer of cream cheese between the filling and the crust.

There was nothing routine about my mother's cooking, but there was a great sense of ritual about it, in summer and in winter.

She began her holiday cooking in October by bringing out the battered aluminum pans that she used for plum pudding. She and a friend, Liz Harris, were in charge of making plum puddings for the annual bazaar at Trinity Episcopal Church in Coshocton, and I guess they made them for 25 years. I remember the trips to the market for the suet and dried fruit, and the puddings steaming in their molds on the stove, and how our laundry room would fill up with the ribbon-tied bundles.