By Michael J. Cleary

Old Santa has made it yet another year. For a moment, I wasn’t too sure. Turns out, he had infiltrated the box containing the Christmas village, which is one of those collections of buildings and people frozen in time, mid-holiday. It mostly gives the cats something to bat around.

Just to enlighten any late-comers, the Old Santa in this case is a faded mercury glass ornament, the type that used to be more commonplace. What started out as a colorful ornament has over time become a very faded and ridiculously fragile ornament. It must be at least 100 years old.

While Old Santa made it this year, there will very likely come a year when he does not. Christmas will still come regardless. Over time, things change. Family members leave us. Others have their own families, and build new traditions of their own. Before you know it, Christmas isn’t what it used to be. But Christmas still comes.

Growing up, Christmas came with an abundance of food. My mom would just go nuts at Christmas. While we didn’t have a lot of money for presents; flour and sugar and other ingredients were (still) relatively cheap, and my mom made somewhere upwards of a thousand cookies and candies. This early — and not exactly healthy — association of happiness to food and sweets has stayed with me my whole life. But there is one particular thing my mom made that has always been my favorite, and this year I set out to make it.

One little snag is that I had misplaced the recipe. But wait, I could just google it! Well, let me tell you, the internet was absolutely no help. It was, in fact, the opposite of help.

The recipe in question is one of my mom’s simply called “Cereal Candy.” I knew it was made with cornflakes, peanuts, all held together with a cooked syrup of sugar, cream and maybe corn syrup. Now, some of you will be thinking you know what I’m talking about and have a recipe. Well, before you think that, I will tell you, there is no peanut butter in my mom’s version. Yet every recipe that popped up on google included peanut butter. No matter how I worded my search, everything came up peanut butter.

I’ve tried the peanut butter version in the past, and they’re fine in their own way, but they are not the ones I want. No, the ones I want are chewy, sweet, but then also salty and peanut-y. They are that combination of sweet and salty that makes them difficult to stop eating.

For me, they are a happy memory of Christmas. My mom made them every year, and of all the cookies and treats she made, these were the ones I always looked forward to. Finally, after quite a bit of searching, my brother found the recipe card. It turns out, they are a little tricky to make, because they require some level of fearlessness, and also a candy thermometer. In my opinion the effort pays off immensely.

So, as my small gift to you all, I’m including the recipe. But no matter what little treat helps give you some holiday joy, I hope you find it.
I wish you all a wonderful holiday season — Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Mom’s Cereal Candy

1 cup sugar

1 cup heavy cream

1 cup light corn syrup

6 cups corn flakes

2 cups peanuts

Lightly oil a 9X13 pan. Cook the sugar, cream and syrup to soft ball (236F). Pour syrup over the cereal and peanuts, and stir to coat. Pour into prepared pan, pat down. Cool before cutting into pieces.

Michael J. Cleary is publisher of Farmers Weekly Review.

Nowadays, my nieces and nephews have their own families, so we have our “family” Christmas before the 25. It’s been this way for quite a few years, and I like it. I do not miss having to drive somewhere on Christmas Day