My Mother's Cookies

My mom was great at making "cut-out" cookies.  You know, the kind of sugar cookie where you roll out the dough, cut out shapes, bake them and then decorate them with frosting.  I think her mom made them before her.  She made them not just for Christmas but just because.

I don't know how many times as a child I opened my Polly Pal or Holly Hobbie lunch box, the metal kind with the matching thermos, and smiled at a cookie smiling back at me.  On a regular basis she made circular shaped cookies frosted white with pink dot eyes and a pink smile.  These are some labor-intensive cookies yet I was always surprised by them.  She worked full time - I don't know when she ever made cookies when I was in elementary school.

By middle school we were making them together.  She rolled the dough right out on the counter top, deftly using a rolling pin to make it an even thickness.  She cut the shapes and in the same movement scooped the shape up off the counter and onto the cookie sheet waiting nearby,  After they baked to a perfect color they popped right off the cookie sheet and onto the cooling rack.  Then we'd ice them together.

Her favorite was the Christmas Tree frosted either white or green and then she'd take a toothpick and dab on different primary colors to look like lights and remind me of the ceramic lighted Christmas trees that my grandparents and great aunt made and decorated their homes with.

Once in a while I get ambitious and try and replicate the cookies. Unless I drench them in flower they stick to my counter and I spend a lot of time cajoling them up with a butter knife only to have the shape destroyed by the time it flops onto the cookie sheet.  I reshape them with my fingers but they never look as good.  

I wish I had thought to ask my mom to make a bunch so I could freeze them in dozens.  She wouldn't have had to ice them.  But maybe just bake 200 dozen, or maybe 500 dozen.  To last the rest of my life.

Luckily my daughter seems to have learned the cookie-baking skill from her Grandma.  I wonder what foods my kids will miss when I'm not here to cook it for them.  It seems like every adult I know could name a food that nobody could make like their mother.  Sort of reminds me of an underlying theme of a book I recently read, Recipes for a Perfect Marriage by Morag Prunty / Kate Kerrigan.

This year I started a new cookie tradition - the Melting Snowman.  My fifth grader helped put the buttons on.  They are sort of like the cut-outs but you start with the drop-n-bake circle cookies.  If I'm here next year, then I will make them again, and every year after that.  My youngest will remember them as his childhood Christmas cookies - since he never really got to know my mom or her cookies.