For our family, this day is partly about opening gifts and eating. If the roads don’t ice up for our get togethers, it just feels happy and sleepy and good.
Sending greetings to all who celebrate Christmas, to all who are celebrating the beginning of Chanukah tonight, and to all who celebrate other traditions.
In fact, I’d love to hear of any childhood memory you may have of a tradition in your family. Not necessarily for this time of year. Families sometimes develop traditions that no one else shares. I’m thinking of little things like singing a certain song every year when you catch the first glimpse of your favorite beach. Or special gestures after two people say the same thing simultaneously.
I’d also be interested in cultural traditions from a place you spent time as a child.
Thank you for your presence on WordPress. It’s fun to have friends in other places.
Photo: Ann Clark Cookie Cutters. Cow cookie cutters are among the many unusual shapes at this Rutland, Vermont, company.
When I started downsizing to move to the new place, I passed along or weeded out all sorts of possessions. Although I wanted to try making Christmas cookies in the new, tiny kitchen, I decided I didn’t need two Christmas trees, two snowmen, two stars. But today’s story makes me want to add shapes like cows, pigs, sharks, and ice cream cones.
Jordan Barry writes at Seven Days Vermont, “For many holiday bakers, the first step in the festive process is a trip into the depths of a forgotten cupboard. Behind lidless Tupperware and single-use appliances, they’ll find a jumble of gingerbread people, stars and trees. And, if those cookie cutters are good ones, there’s a high likelihood they were made in Vermont.
“Inconspicuously tucked into the warehouse land of Rutland’s Quality Lane, Ann Clark is the United States’ largest producer of cookie cutters, selling 4 to 5 million per year. Founded in 1989 by the artist for whom it is named and now led by her son, Ben Clark, the company sits behind only Chinese mega-manufacturers on the global cookie cutter scale. And as it continues to grow, the family-owned operation is expanding into all aspects of the baking biz, from food coloring to cake mixes.
“Cookie cutters are just one of the items that Ann’s art inspired, Ben told Seven Days on a tour of the facility in early November. … The convivial CEO described a folksy drawing of a pig that his mother and his business-consultant father had made into cutting boards, Christmas tree ornaments, coasters and cookie cutters to sell at trade shows. The cookie cutter, with a handmade recipe card tied to it, was the runaway hit.
“Soon, that pig was joined by a cow and a sheep. In those days, the family focused on selling their cookie cutters to gift stores and making custom promotional ones for businesses such as McDonald’s and Under Armour. Now, Ann Clark has an arsenal of roughly 3,500 shapes — around 700 of which are currently available — that range from simple numbers to holiday staples to a ‘fashion doll head,’ which surged in sales this summer around the release of Barbie.
“New shapes can be made in a day, inspired by trends, pop culture moments, competitors’ products, and creative ideas from employees and bakers around the country. There’s a cookie cutter for each of the year’s ’26 events,’ Ben said — a list that includes Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.
“Of all 3,500, Ann’s favorite shape is the watering can. It became Ben’s sentimental favorite, too, after they realized it was the company’s worst seller. Any shape that does worse is immediately cut. …
“The company works with many of the top cookiers in the world, who test new shapes and send their elaborately decorated samples to Ann Clark HQ. Digital content manager Annora McGarry catalogs them in a ‘cookie library’ and stores the physical cookies in an office closet for use in photo shoots.
“Ann Clark cookie cutters’ high-profile fans include the team at King Arthur Baking in Norwich. The companies have worked together ‘for many years, and they are a wonderful partner,’ said Nathalie Morin, associate product manager at King Arthur.
“Cookie cutter designs should have enough detail to be easy to decipher, without small, pointy elements that will make dough stick or overbake, she explained. Metal cutters make the crispest cut, and rolled edges make pressing down more comfortable. …
“The cutters’ American-made status is a selling point for many, Ben said, but not always for the most obvious reason. … ‘It’s really about lead time.’
“When a shape runs out at the Ann Clark factory, it takes the production team just about nine minutes to change the die — a heavy metal block in the shape of a cutter’s final form — and start a replacement run. The new cutters are packaged and shipped by the following morning, whereas it could take months to import replacements from China, Ben said. During the busiest times of year, 12 to 15 employees across two shifts change dies 50 times a day, producing up to 500 cookie cutters per run. …
“When the business started, a company called Creative Products made the cookie cutters in Pennsylvania. Ann Clark slowly brought manufacturing in-house over the course of seven years, eventually acquiring Creative Products — and its accounts with stores such as Sur la Table, Williams Sonoma, Bed Bath & Beyond and Crate & Barrel.
” ‘We realized we’d been trying to convince gift stores that a cookie cutter is a great gift,’ Ben said. ‘Every kitchen store already knows what a cookie cutter is and why it’s great. We could barely keep up.’ …
“The team tested a host of private-label products, including food coloring, sprinkles, icing mix and meringue powder. The food coloring, like the pig design that launched a cookie cutter empire, was the clear winner. It kept selling out, and the manufacturer couldn’t keep up. With the help of food scientists, the Ann Clark team developed its own recipe and built a separate, food-safe facility down the road.
“That facility now produces 3,000 tubes of food coloring a day, along with products such as royal icing and fondant.
” ‘The food coloring is amazing,’ said Paulina Thompson, who launched her Essex Junction home-based biz, Paulina’s Sweets, in February 2021. ‘You can achieve the colors really fast, especially for that Christmas red that everybody wants.’ “
I like this about traditions: they are always a little the same and a little different. You carry forward the old activities, but you and the people around you are a little different every year and customs get tweaked.
I’m posting a few pictures of holiday doings that are both the same and different in our family.
The youngest grandchild decorating a reindeer cookie. My collage gift tags made from scraps. Another grandchild’s Christmas tree watercolors. Luminaria bags with candles. A traditional light display.
My husband and I and Suzanne’s family gathered for a magnificent meal at John’s house, and everyone ended up dancing to Gummy Bears disco videos in the dark.
Now for something a little different in the Christmas cookie department. How about gingersnaps that look like ancient clay tablets? With cuneiform inscriptions.
As Jennifer A Kingson writes at the New York Times, that’s what Katy Blanchard of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology brought to her holiday party a few years ago. Now everyone wants to try it.
“Ms. Blanchard, whose passions are archaeology and baking, used chopsticks, a fish knife and a gingerbread recipe that came packaged with a Coliseum-shaped cookie-cutter she once bought. Not only did her cuneiform cookies beguile her colleagues at the office party, they also gained some measure of internet renown after a Penn Museum publicist posted an article about how she made them. (Sample comment from the public: ‘Mine will probably taste more like the Dead Sea Scrolls.’)
“From there, cuneiform cookies started to become — as the newspaper The Forward put it — ‘a thing.’ Bloggers were enthralled, including one who said she was taking a class in Hittite and opted to practice on shortbread. …
” ‘It really struck the world in just the right nerdy place,’ said Ms. Blanchard, noting that a number of people, including home schooling parents, classroom teachers and scholars of ancient languages, had taken the idea and run with it. …
“Inspired by Ms. Blanchard’s cuneiform cookies, Esther Brownsmith, a Ph.D. student in the Bible and Near East program at Brandeis University who has been studying Akkadian for years, went all out: For a New Year’s party, she baked four tablets of gingerbread, each on a 13-by-18-inch pan, and copied part of the Enuma Elish, a seven-tablet Babylonian creation myth, onto them. A stunning step-by-step description of this feat has drawn thousands of ‘likes on her Tumblr blog.”
Photo: The Forward and Kay Blanchard
The online world is snapping up recipes for these gingerbread cuneiform cookies by Katy Blanchard of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Suzanne, her son, and I made 50 valentines, and I trotted along Thursday when he carried them in a little striped bag to nursery school. The school had told parents that it was fine if kids didn’t do valentines, but if they wanted to bring any, then they needed to bring them for everyone.
Suzanne reports the cards were a great success: “They decorated bags and then went around putting valentines in each others’ bags. G really liked opening the valentines at home and reading the kids’ names. He particularly liked the one from a boy whose parents didn’t follow the rules and included a lollipop. 🙂 ”
My Valentine is in New York to help Erik with the kids while Suzanne attends the Playtime trade show. The cookies I made are for him when he gets home.
By the way, if you want to see some funny valentine gifs that listeners made at the behest of the radio show Studio 360, click here.
After my older grandson (4-1/2) and older granddaughter (nearly 2) let me play too as they decorated their gingerbread cookies, I went home and pulled out the sugar-cookie recipe from the nursery school cookbook John made in 1975. It’s still the best.
Observation on cookie cutters: Swedes know their moose. I have several moose/reindeer cookie cutters, but the only one that works well is the one from Erik’s mother. It has plump legs and antlers. Why is that important? Because skinny legs and antlers invariably break off.
The grandson, granddaughter, and I have the same abstract aesthetic when it comes to decorating.
The Little Mermaid window ornament is from Erik’s sister, who lives in Denmark.
Getting in the spirit: listening to carols on the radio, decorating the fat tree my husband found, attending my friend Alden’s holiday concert at the Melrose Symphony (a whole post on that to come), and baking cookies.
Even though I try new recipes, I find the sugar cookie recipe John got in nursery school to be the most reliable, and I love the worn cookbook he made, held together by yarn, and his scribbles on the cover.
I especially love this line in recipe: “use good-sized cookie cutters so children can be successful in handling shapes.”
Here I am working away. Please note my five golden rings, Suzanne’s creation.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 