A Favorite Holiday Story

At this time of year, when I hear Salvation Army bells ringing and see cars driving past with evergreen trees tied to their rooftops, I start to remember favorite holiday stories. I wrote about one in our book, “Winter Passage.” We were moored in Sidney Harbor on Vancouver Island for the holiday season…


Here it is, five days until Christmas – usually my favorite time of the year, but for whatever reason the Christmas spirit eludes me. There is something missing. Bob asked if I miss my Victorian house, with candles glowing in the windows, a collection of antique ornaments on a 12-foot tree, cedar garlands and red-berried holly decorating the front porch. I consider that for a moment and decide – no, it’s not the house that I miss. I think it is the little things like baking Christmas cookies.

Every Christmas for over thirty years, I have made the same sugar cookies using the same cookie cutters …a tree, a holly wreath and a star; decorating them with colored icing, sprinkles and red cinnamon candies. They have gone to school for homeroom parties, filled a cut glass tray for open houses, or presented on saran-wrapped paper plates to next-door neighbors. When my sons were young, they helped decorate them, eating as many of the cinnamon candies as they put on the cookies. And later I shared this family tradition with my granddaughter Shelley. She was a little more meticulous than her father, but ate just as many cinnamon candies. So while I lay in bed this morning, a sudden thought occurred to me… why not bake some Christmas cookies?

Since none of my baking supplies are here on the boat, our mission today was to get everything needed to make my favorite Christmas tree cookie. I decided that the simplest way to do it would be to use refrigerated Pillsbury cookie dough and a can of frosting. We try three grocery stores and none of them have the refrigerated cookie dough. So I need to make them from scratch after all, but after 30 years of making these cookies, I can’t remember the recipe. At a used bookstore I find a cookbook for cookies and quickly jot down the ingredients for sugar cookies on a scrap of paper.

Back at the grocery store we find canned frosting, green food coloring and green sprinkles without difficulty. But the Christmas tree cookie cutter and red cinnamon candies are another matter. Everywhere we go we are told they are sold out of Christmas tree cookie cutters. Finally at a little drugstore a clerk says, “Just a minute. I think we may have one left. Here it is.” She holds out a package of four plastic Christmas shapes, one of which is a tree. I hate plastic cutters, but at this point I have no choice and the package only costs a dollar. We leave the store with my cookie cutter.

Now for the red cinnamon candies. Six stores later… the clerk at the 7-11 Store says, “No, we don’t have them but the Candyman Store might.” She calls the local candy store for us, and yes, they do have red cinnamon hearts. We thank the clerk and hurry to the Candyman. “We are the people who want the cinnamon hearts.” “Oh yes, here they are. How many do you want?” While one clerk weighs out our candy hearts, another offers us some freshly baked shortbread, “Anyone who comes all the way from the 7-11 deserves a treat!” The 7-11 wasn’t that far away!!
But we don’t turn down the shortbread.

We pass a florist shop and decide to stop in and buy some holly. They have only one bag left – sort of bedraggled – and the owner says, “Just take it… no charge. Merry Christmas.”

We have met kind, thoughtful and helpful people all day long. That is the true Christmas spirit. The Christmas tree cookies I bake will only be a reflection of that spirit. (December 1997)

A year later a package arrived from my sister Nancy… a box holding ten packages of red cinnamon candies.

... P. L. Morningstar