The Christmas Baskets

I got married while I was still in college. We were living on student loans and part-time jobs and visits from our parents, who bought us groceries when they came. I think our budget for Christmas gifts for everyone was $100. It may have been less.

Stretching $100 to all of the people we wanted to give gifts to was a challenge. I solved it by giving everyone the same thing: homemade cookies. I bought ingredients for half a dozen cookie recipes, and an assortment of Christmas tins from the thrift store, and everyone on our list got a tin of cookies.

We continued to be poor college students; later, we were poor graduate students. I continued, for years, to bake cookies for Christmas. Recipients requested their favorites: iced bonbons and oatmeal scotchies and chocolate haystacks were popular. 

And then, at last, we graduated! We got jobs. For once I had money to buy actual Christmas gifts – sweaters and books and cute little desktop basketball games and jewelry. I went Christmas shopping, and I had a blast buying fun, thoughtful gifts for people I cared about.

They loved their gifts. But they also said, later, in private, a little plaintively, “I missed my cookies. I was looking forward to the cookies.” I was both surprised and gratified that people would rather have my homemade cookies than a much more expensive gift from the store.

The next year, I went back to baking cookies for Christmas.

I had two daughters, and as they grew, we added their handmade crafts to the baskets: light bulb ornaments and ice-chip candles; painted clay flower pots and weaving-kit potholders; something different every year.

We lived in Kentucky, then. In downtown Owensboro was a shop that sold items exclusively made in Kentucky, including empty bourbon bottles heated up and pressed into cutting boards. I thought they were neat, so I added one to each cookie gift. I switched from tins to baskets, because the baskets were more generous. Every year, I hunted all year for interesting, hand-made or locally-produced items to add to the baskets. At Christmas, there would be cookies, and stories: “Oh, the dropped-glass magnets! We found those at a little artisans’ shop in Georgia!” or, “The cotton boll ornaments came from the state house gift shop, when we went back to Carolina to visit friends!” or, “The melted vinyl record bowls were from a vendor at a craft fair we went to.”

The Christmas baskets caught on with my family, and we began exchanging them among adults. Baskets from my brother always include Boy Scout popcorn, because my nephew is a Scout. My sister’s once included a handmade soapstone figurine whose purchase supported an overseas orphanage. As adults who don’t need a lot of things, these gifts that come with stories attached –where they came from, how they were found, what they mean or who they help –are meaningful, fun, and less stressful, at least to me, than spending endless hours in crowded stores.

And mine still come with cookies.