My daughter and I made black-walnut fudge last weekend, following a recipe my mother used for many, many years. Then we packaged the sweet chocolate squares into little boxes lined with tin foil to give away during the holidays. Just like my mother used to do.

We also baked six loaves of bread on Sunday, a heavy, moist bread made with mashed potatoes and a little ginger. While the loaves were still warm, we wrapped them in tinfoil and decorated them with red and green ribbons. Then, with the edge of a scissors, I curled the narrow ribbed ribbon into springs of color, and my daughter delivered the delicious-smelling packages to some of our neighbors.

Later that evening, my family sat down to a meal of homemade egg rolls, a gift from one of the neighbors, and a loaf of bread that I kept for us.

The holiday food exchange began years ago, our neighborhood's way of saying even though we're busy with our own lives, we still remember each other fondly, especially at Christmas time.

I always enjoy how we celebrate the holidays with long-standing traditions, many of them associated with food. These rituals are a way of connecting us to our earlier lives, as we fondly recall a favorite dish, holiday song or family custom.

While these traditions link us to our past, they also serve as a way of passing on a little of ourselves to our children and grandchildren, to help ensure that we may be remembered after we are gone.

I began thinking about holiday traditions after talking to a man at the local library last Saturday morning.

Appearing to be in his 60s, the man was searching through a stack of books for a cookie recipe like the one his grandmother used to make. The cookie, he explained, was a thin round sugar wafer layered with jelly. It was topped by another cookie with a hole in the center, and jelly would ooze through the opening. He recounted that his favorite part in making the cookies was cutting the center out of the dough.

"When I was a kid and it was Christmastime," the man told me, "I would get so excited because I knew my grandmother would be making these jelly cookies."

With a half-century-old memory to guide him, the man leafed through books and found a recipe similar to his grandmother's. He left the library with the intention of making the jelly cookies with his own granddaughter sometime during the holidays.

My daughter and I have been making Grandma's fudge for several years now, every since my mother suffered a severe stroke several years ago. We always bring a box of fudge to the nursing home, where she now lives, just as my mother used to bring a box of fudge to her own mother, who also spent her last years in a nursing home.

Making fudge during the holidays brings back fond memories of my mother; I hope someday my daughter and her children will make fudge at Christmastime and think of me.