Welcome back to Blogmas 2025, my annual series of holiday-themed blog posts that will run every day until Christmas. This year, I decided to let AI generate my writing prompts because, well, sometimes you need a creative push from our future robot overlords. Today’s prompt asks me to share my favorite holiday food or drink, along with a recipe or memory tied to it. And honestly? This one’s easy.

I have to go with Mamaw’s famous macaroni and cheese.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mac and cheese? For Christmas? That’s not exactly gingerbread cookies or candy canes. But hear me out. In my family, Mamaw’s mac and cheese wasn’t just a side dish—it was the side dish. Every Christmas Eve, amid the ham and green beans and rolls and whatever experimental casserole someone decided to bring that year, there sat Mamaw’s mac and cheese in all its golden, bubbling glory. It was the first dish to empty, the one everyone went back for seconds (and thirds) of, and the one we all secretly hoped would have leftovers but never did.

There was something about her mac and cheese that defied explanation. It wasn’t fancy. She didn’t use seventeen different artisanal cheeses or truffle oil or any of that Food Network nonsense. It was just mac and cheese, but somehow it was also magic. The kind of magic that makes grown adults elbow their way to the front of the buffet line and causes cousins to negotiate trades—”I’ll give you my corner piece of mac and cheese for your slice of chocolate pie.” (The corner pieces were the best, with their extra crispy edges.)

The thing about family recipes is that they’re rarely written down properly. They exist in the muscle memory of grandmothers who measure with their hearts and season “until it looks right.” So when I decided several years ago that I wanted to bring Mamaw’s mac and cheese to an Easter potluck with friends, I knew I needed more than some random instructions of “Oh, you know, just throw some cheese on noodles and bake it.”

I asked if she’d teach me, and a couple weeks before Easter, I found myself in her kitchen, notebook in hand, ready to decode the mystery of the world’s best mac and cheese. Watching Mamaw cook was like watching a master artist who’d been painting the same masterpiece for fifty years. Every movement was automatic, practiced, perfect. She’d reach for ingredients without looking, know exactly how much butter to use without measuring, and could tell the noodles were done by the sound they made stirring in the pot.

“Now pay attention,” she said, dumping a box of elbow macaroni into boiling water. “You don’t want them too soft because they’ll keep cooking in the oven.”

I scribbled notes furiously, trying to capture not just the ingredients but the technique, the little things that made it special. The way she’d test a noodle by pressing it against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. How she’d layer the cheese—not grated, but sliced and stood up between the noodles “so it melts down through everything.” The specific block of Colby cheese from the grocery store—not the fancy deli counter stuff, just the regular block from the dairy aisle.

“How much salt?” I asked.

“Until it tastes right.”

“What temperature for the oven?”

“Hot enough.”

“How long do you bake it?”

“Until it’s done.”

This is the burden of learning from grandmothers. They cook by instinct, by the accumulated wisdom of thousands of dinners, by the way the kitchen smells when something’s ready. But I pressed on, making her pause and actually measure things (much to her amusement), turning her poetry into my prose.

The real magic of that afternoon wasn’t in learning the recipe, though. It was in standing beside her in that kitchen where she’d cooked countless meals. It was in her stories between steps. “The secret,” she told me as we waited for it to bake, “is you have to make it with love. That’s what makes it good.”

I wanted to roll my eyes at the cliché, but watching her check the oven, the satisfied smile when she saw the top browning just right, I knew she meant it. This wasn’t just food to her. It was connection, tradition, love made tangible and served hot.

When Easter came, I made the mac and cheese for my friends, following my carefully transcribed notes. It was good—really good, actually. People went back for seconds and asked for the recipe. But it wasn’t quite the same. It lacked something ineffable, some quality that apparently couldn’t be measured in cups and tablespoons.

Now, I should probably share the recipe with you, though I’ll warn you upfront that my notes from that day are… let’s say “interpretive.” It’s been a while since I’ve made it, and I’m piecing this together from memory like I’m trying to recreate a dream. If any of my family reads this and realizes I’ve gotten it completely wrong, please correct me in the comments. Consider this less of a recipe and more of a treasure map where X marks “somewhere in the general vicinity of delicious.”

Mamaw’s Mac & Cheese (As Best I Can Remember)

Ingredients:

• 1 box elbow macaroni
• 1/2 stick of butter (or was it a whole stick?)
• 1 egg (possibly 2?)
• A splash of milk (maybe? I feel like there was milk involved)
• 1 block of Colby cheese (the regular grocery store kind)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the noodles until tender but not mushy—al dente, I guess, though Mamaw would never use that term. Drain the water and dump the noodles into a 9×13 baking dish. Place pats of butter all over the top of the noodles while they’re still hot so it starts melting.

Whisk the egg (or eggs?) with what I’m now 70% sure was a little milk, and pour it over the noodles, making sure to spread it around evenly. The egg is crucial—it’s what makes it custardy and holds everything together. Add salt and pepper to taste, though I always lean heavier on the pepper.

Here’s the important part: Don’t grate the cheese. Slice it and stand the pieces up throughout the noodles, like little cheese soldiers at attention. Make sure you have enough to cover the top too. The standing cheese creates pockets of melty goodness throughout instead of just a cheese layer on top.

Bake at… 350? 375? Let’s say 350. For… 30 minutes? 45? Until the top is golden brown and the edges are getting crispy and your kitchen smells like heaven. You’ll know it’s done when it looks right, which I realize is exactly the kind of unhelpful instruction Mamaw would give.

The truth is, even if you follow this quasi-recipe perfectly (or imperfectly, which is more likely given my documentation skills), it probably won’t taste exactly like Mamaw’s. Because the real ingredients—the years of practice, the exact weight of her hand adding salt, the specific oven with its quirks and hot spots, the love and intention she put into feeding her family—those can’t be measured or written down.

But that’s okay. The point isn’t to recreate something exactly. It’s to carry it forward, to take what was given to us and make it our own. Every time I make mac and cheese now (even when I cheat and use the blue box), I think about that afternoon in Mamaw’s kitchen. I think about Christmas Eves with the whole family crowded around tables, about the cousin negotiations over corner pieces, about the way food becomes memory becomes tradition.

And sometimes, if I’m really lucky and I’ve gotten the cheese-to-noodle ratio just right and the top is perfectly golden, I take a bite and for just a second, I’m back in her kitchen, and she’s smiling that satisfied smile, and everything tastes like home.

That’s the real magic of holiday food, isn’t it? It’s never really about the food itself. It’s about what it represents, what it connects us to, who we become when we gather around it. Mamaw’s mac and cheese isn’t just mac and cheese—it’s every Christmas Eve, every family gathering, every moment when food became love became memory.

Even if I can’t quite remember if it’s one egg or two.

What’s your family’s signature holiday dish? The one that wouldn’t be Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever you celebrate) without it? And more importantly, do you actually know the recipe, or is it locked away in a grandmother’s intuition somewhere? Let me know in the comments—especially if you have strong opinions about the egg-to-milk ratio in baked mac and cheese, because I could really use the help.