Today I made a favorite family Christmas treat.
Date Nut Bars.
I remember my great aunts Alice and Elizabeth (for whom I am named...both of them) making them. They gathered the pecans from my grandmother's yard and shelled and picked out the nut meat. They bought whole dates which they probably had to remove the pits and then chop them. They creamed the butter and sugar by hand and added all the other ingredients, mixed and baked them.
Today, I used my Kitchen Aid mixer on the butter and sugar, used packaged chopped pecans and dates...took 10 minutes to mix all the rest and bake them.
I wonder if theirs were better, they are both long gone. I wonder if I would make them if I had to do all they work they did.
Mine are still good, though and bring wonderful memories.
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Do you coat them in powdered sugar? If not, try it.
Our family recipe used walnuts.
After cutting them up and coating in powdered sugar,
you can store them in a crock for a loooong time and they just get better.
Would you share your recipe? Mine is long lost. 
But used dates and walnuts. I searched through all of my cook books, and found a recipe. It calls for eggs, flour, sugar nuts and dates. Separate the eggs, whip the whites. Mix all of the other ingredients together, then fold in the whites, bake. Cut them into bars, roll them in xxx sugar. They dry out kind of fast, probably because there is no fat in the recipe.
They taste like Gram's. I was so happy to find a recipe that was like hers. A few years ago, I substituted dried cranberries for the dates, and that makes an awesome bar cookie, too. And pretty for Christmas 
