Taffy Twist

"How's it look?" my mother asked me. I stared into the boiling pink goo（感伤，粘性物） bubbling up in the pan. My mom had decided¹ that we should have an "old-fashioned" Christmas this year, and we were experimenting with making taffy（太妃糖） for the first time in our lives.

 

"I think it's ready," I said. The candy thermometer read 265 degrees. My mother checked it.

 

"It's definitely ready," she said. "Let's pour it out."

 

My little sister, Janet, had a large cookie sheet buttered and ready to go. My brother Mike and his best friend, Jimmy, looked on as my mother took the hot pan off the stove and poured the pink taffy slowly onto the cookie sheet. It looked shiny and delicious.

 

"While we wait for that to cool, let's pull this one," my mom said, pointing to the white taffy we'd made earlier.

 

"Yeah!" we shouted. It was the moment we'd been waiting for. My mom cut the white taffy into two halves and gave one hunk to Mike and Jimmy, and the other hunk to Janet and me. As teams, we began pulling on opposite sides of our taffy, making long stringy（绳的，纤维的） lengths, folding it in half and pulling it out again. We did this over and over until our sticky taffy turned smooth and satiny. It was hot work, but no one minded on such a cold December night in Alaska. It made us feel cozy² even though huge snowflakes spun³ past the streetlights outside.

 

Now that the taffy was pulled, we rolled it into one big ball. From there, we took small pieces and formed them into little taffy "snakes." When the pink taffy was cool enough, we repeated the process.

 

"Now," my mother said, "watch this." She picked up a length of white taffy and a length of pink taffy and twisted them together. She pinched the ends and formed a crook⁴（骗子，弯处） at the top. "It's a candy cane⁵!" she said.

 

"How cool!" we said, excited to be making our own candy canes⁶ from scratch. We got busy twisting the taffy and soon had a large batch⁷ of candy canes ready. We took them out to the living room and hung them one by one on our Christmas tree. Our tree was decorated with homemade ornaments⁸ in the spirit of an old-fashioned Christmas and the freshly made candy canes added just the right touch. We took a moment to admire our handiwork and then headed back into the kitchen to clean up our mess.

 

After the last pan had been washed and dried and the kitchen was tidied up, we returned to the living room to enjoy our creations and relax in front of the fire. But when we entered the living room, the sight of our tree made us stop and stare in amazement⁹.

 

The homemade taffy candy canes were now two and three feet long! They oozed¹⁰ from branch to branch like thick pink and white spider webs.

 

"Oh no!" my mother shrieked¹¹. "The heat from the fireplace is melting the taffy!"

 

Mike stifled¹² a laugh. That did it. In an instant, we were all hysterical¹³（歇斯底里的） with laughter as we watched the blobs of taffy slowly plop（扑通落下） onto the carpet.

 

The next year at Christmas, we bought candy canes from the store.

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