I’ve been cooking and baking nonstop for the last week. I’ve gone through ten pounds of flour, four pounds of butter, and innumerable eggs. I’ve made dips, cookies, bread, meatballs and many other lovely things, and I’m not inclined to stop until the New Year.

Part of the reason for the kitchen flurry lies in the season. We celebrate Christmas, and many of our food traditions show up at this time of year. Ethnically, I’m British, German, Danish, and Swedish, primarily, and when I look at my holiday menu, I see the ripples of those traditions settle on my plate. I’ve always been the primary cookie baker at Christmas in the family, and I certainly made a dent in my usual list: butter cookies, Russian tea cakes, peanut butter bon-bons, and peanut butter kiss cookies all appeared on my table—and disappeared from it. I made garlic-artichoke dip and olive tapenade, and baked fresh French bread for those allergic to soy and corn in the family.

Most of these recipes are family favorites I picked up here and there over the course of a lifetime. The bon-bons? Middle school French class. Tea cakes? Middle-school home economics class. Peanut butter kiss? My cousin’s Grandma Elaine. Butter cookies? Who knows? But they’re a staple on all German and Scandinavian holiday tables.

The garlic-artichoke dip comes from an editor at my first professional newspaper job. She brought it hot and bubbling to each gathering, and it was luscious. I never got her recipe, so I’ve been playing with it ever since, trying to get it right. I think I’m close. The tapenade was a suggestion from my earliest viewings of the Food Network. I think it might have been a Cooking Live Primetime recipe.

But other foods clearly come through an ethnic heritage. For breakfast on Christmas Day, we have German potato sausage, made by my mother and her sister. For dinner on Christmas Eve, it’s always Swedish meatballs, thanks to my Grandpa Tom, a first-generation son of Swedish immigrants. On Christmas Day, dinner has always sort of rotated, but now that I host it at home, when I can afford it, we have a beef rib roast, a nod to my British ancestry.

If I have leftover mashed potatoes, I’ll probably make lefse. My Irish Grandma Elsie learned how to make it from her Scandinavian neighbors in northern Wisconsin, and she taught me how to make it.

Other traditions just creep in. I bought a snowflake waffle maker a few years ago; it was Frozen-themed. My girls were little and very into Elsa and Anna and Olaf. Now, apparently, I’m required to make snowflake waffles to go with our sausage on Christmas morning every year. (What will happen when the waffle maker gives out? A problem for another day, I guess.)

As I’m getting older, I find myself stopping to reflect more often on the heritage that stays with us, and the legacies our ancestors leave behind them. I’ll savor the next cookie and wonder: Which of my ancestors made this, too?