purplerabbit

When my grandmother, Juanita Davis, was a young new mother, she got a cookie press and a recipe for Spritz (butter) cookies and began a holiday tradition of making them with her children every year. For seventy years, my mother and her siblings, and now my generation and their children, have been making little shaped cookies every year and giving them as gifts to people we care about. In my family, we have made the little sun shaped ones part of our Yule ritual as well.

My mother and I make up large batches, fill bright cookie tins and give them as gifts. We spend a couple months running around thrift stores looking for the tins. (And if you have any empty tins from last year, you can always pass them on to us for use in the future.) This year my mother also added all her Red Hat Society group to our list. So over the last several weeks we have baked ten batches. The recipe says they make 150 cookies a batch. Which means we have made 1500 cookies! That's 60 tins of cookies.

The base of our tree is now surrounded by cookie tins. We will give them to our friends and neighbours on Winter Solstice. If you can't make our gathering, make sure to drop by for yours!