Who Cares About Cookie Cutters?

Who Cares About Cookie Cutters?

Well, I do. They're common enough tools, but I value those snippets of bent metal, from the early tin ones to the modern steel or aluminum ones. Don’t get me started on the tacky plastic ones; they have no soul.  I own about 300, and the collection goes on. Some are my great-grandmother’s, my grandmother’s, my mom’s, mine from my childhood. Others are  travel souvenirs: a moose from Alaska, a palm tree from Florida, a sea turtle from Hawaii, a crab from San Francisco, a snowflake from a magical December getaway in the mountains. Each has a memory, a story in its shape. 

When we designed our house, pushing out the bow window left a weird overhang, a flat wall about 15 feet long and ten inches tall. The builder lamented, “It’s holding up the roof. I just can’t fix it!” Fix it?! Clearly, that was designed for my cookie cutter collection to be displayed, part of it anyway. In the center is my family. I found a cookie-man, a cookie-woman, a cookie-girl, and two cookie-boys, one smaller than the other, representing my daughter and two sons.  I arranged them under a temple cookie cutter, and above a sideways broom. That’s a nod to my southern years; jump the broom, get it?

My latest book is a multi-generational  story told through the perspective of an elderly woman, the keeper of the antique cookie cutter collection. I’m enjoying the research phase! Did you know the most –expensive cookie cutter, called Running Slave, sold for nearly $8000 in a heated auction? As I bring the story from Queen Charlotte’s period to current times, my heart is drawn to the generations of women who baked cookies for their families. Some were servants in England, other indentured servants in the New World, some slaves in America through no wish of their own. Mothers made cookies for their children, early nurses gave the harder ones to fussy babies to teeth on. Some women made them to sell, including a couple of enterprising women who used their baked goods as a way to slip messages under the noses of King George’s troops in Boston, triggering the timing of the Revolutionary War.

My own mother always had cookies in the cookie jar.  Mom is an orderly soul; she likes identical cookies.  When I was a child, milk and cookies was a common way to sit with a  child after school and ask How Was Your Day, Honey?  One of my favorite memories was when my family was traveling when I was a child. We stopped for a gas in a very small town somewhere in the Midwest.  As soon as we stepped out to stretch our legs, we were engulfed by an overwhelming lemon-cookie aroma. The gas station attendant laughed and said Ma, the owner of Ma’s Cookies, always turned her vent fans toward the gas station when she noticed travelers stopping, and wouldn’t we like to go to her bakery across the parking lot? We drove away with warm lemon cuts outs, bags of them.

A simple tool, it’s unlikely many people count cookie cutters as anything worthwhile, just a faster way to make same-shape-same-size cookies in a hurry. I see the story in them, a memory tied up in each. And I find it hard to talk about cookies without wanting one, so here’s a recipe for you:  

Sugar Cut Out Cookies

·         1-½ cup butter  

·         2 cups sugar

·         2 whole eggs

·         2 whole eggs yolks

·         4 teaspoons vanilla extract

·         2 teaspoons almond extract

·         4 cups all-purpose flour

·         1 teaspoon salt

·         1 teaspoon baking powder

In a mixer, beat butter and sugar until well combined, about 2 minutes. Add in 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks and mix until combined. Mix in  vanilla and almond extract until combined. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Slowly (about a cup at a time) add flour to butter mixture and combine. Just mix ingredients until they are combined, so as not to toughen the dough. Cover and chill at least one hour. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll dough out, cut out cookies, and bake for 6-8 minutes. Drizzle with a simple glaze or frost as desired.

Glaze:  stir one cup powdered sugar with enough orange juice or milk to make a pancake-batter consistency. Drizzle over cooled cookies with a fork. 

Best Christmas Present Ever

Best Christmas Present Ever

Our family begins asking, “What would you like for Christmas this year?” in October. Several years ago, I wanted to head them off.

Our kids were all in their twenties; students, newlyweds, one with a young child, two pregnant, busy, all underemployed in various stages of poverty, but each with a giving heart. They’d want to give me a Christmas present; gift giving is a big part of the season’s fun. Telling them, “Don’t get anything for me” would hurt their feelings. Besides, I like gifts!

I don’t need more Stuff, and at this stage of life, if I see something I’d like to have, I buy it myself. What could they give me that I’d really treasure, not tuck away on a shelf? If I could come up with a wonderful, meaningful, inexpensive gift, I’d be happy; bonus points if it was a long-term idea.

I pondered for days. 

What do I value? I value my family, the Savior, travel, conversation, and the power of Story. We’d taught our young ones to tell stories since they were tiny; it's part of the fabric of our family. Stories bind us together and set us apart as people. You don’t see raccoons sitting around telling tales, do you?

That was my answer: I wanted stories! I pondered for days, and settled on these criteria: I wanted a story from each adult and literate grandchild (one, at that stage). I clearly said, “This is not a let-the-wife-handle-it-type gift.” The story was to be non-fiction, preferably a memory from their own life, it could include me, but didn’t have to, and it was to be long enough to properly to tell the story, whether that be eight pages or six lines.

In October, I sent out a mass email to all of our children and their spouses, detailing the gift I wanted. Just think, all they had to do was write a story! It’s the perfect gift---no cost, except their time, no stress or shopping, and it’d be something I would cherish. My heart smiled as I imagined reading stories for Christmas, my birthday, Mother’s Day, and onward.

I was excited to hear their responses. Instead, my email was utterly ignored. Over the weeks approaching Christmas, my broad hints were brushed aside with a sighed, “Oh, Mom, really.” My heart sunk, resigned to another lovely throw pillow or bowl.

On Christmas morning, tears flowed, but not from disappointment. While I thought my kids were ignoring me, they were conspiring. A daughter bought plastic sheet protectors. A daughter-in-law was tasked with designing a scrap-book-type cover for the optimistic-sized loose-leaf bind my son was ordered to purchase. All of them wrote a story, just for me!

The stories gave insight into family members. I learned why a daughter-in-law’s family values education so strongly, and I could feel her shock in finding her dad’s 8^th grade report card with a C+ on it, tucked in with his baseball award. Another daughter-in-law detailed the day of her engagement. I hadn’t known my son proposed to her on a cliff. As he knelt, he “accidentally” dropped the ring box into the valley a thousand feet below. As I read, I could imagine her scream echoing across the canyon, and her relief when he laughed and pulled the glittery ring from his pocket.  

My five-year-old granddaughter dictated her story, and drew a delightful, wobbly illustration of the stuffed felt chickens I had helped her sew the previous month. A son-in-law wrote of a camping trip on a sailboat in Alaska with his eleven siblings... and no running water. My daughter wrote of the things she had learned from me, her mother, and her hopes of being a good mother to her unborn child. Our son wrote of the joy he felt teaching the gospel and bolstering the sagging spirits of discouraged missionaries; in his mission, he was known as a “fixer.”

Another  son detailed memories of a family trip in which we played in the snow on a mountain, acquired sunburns in the high desert, sledded, swam, hiked through a canyon, toured an orchard and sampled new apple varieties under development, rode a ferry, visited a museum, splashed in  a waterfall, enjoyed an old-fashioned soda fountain, toured a hydroelectric dam, crossed a steel-mesh bridge on foot through an old-growth forest, climbed on a vintage train, played on a massive new playground, toured a candy factory (with samples), drove through desert, mountains, farms, forests, meadows, across rivers and valleys and canyons...all in two days. I sighed, remembering our many family vacations, most of which were just that packed. “As long as we’re nearby, we may as well see as much as we can” was an unspoken motto.

I wiped tears, I laughed, I choked up as I read each story aloud. My heartfelt response encouraged my kids: at last, they had a gift idea Mom loved! Every Christmas, birthday, and Mother’s Day since then, I’ve received a set of new stories. That optimistic-sized binder is stuffed now, as stories multiply and grandchildren grow old enough to add their own stories. On sad days, I take comfort in reading over my fat collection of stories. This truly is the best gift I could ask for.

Christmas is coming! If you love stories as much as I do, feel free to take my idea.