JAN 2024 - When There's A Cookie

It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve, our first in the new apartment, our two-and-a-half-year-old son healthy after more than six months of illness. I celebrate Chanukah—lighting candles on the menorah and making latkes (potato pancakes). My husband’s Christmas celebrations always included a tree, fancily decorated with lights. I didn’t mind having a Christmas tree. What I did mind were the decorations—baubles, tinsel, and glitter. I understood his wanting a Christmas tree but we had no money to buy one. We could barely pay our bills. Still, Christmas without a tree was not Christmas for him. After pacing up and down the living room, more and more unhappy, he stopped and said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to get a tree.” I asked how he intended to pay for it. Ignoring my question, he stormed out.

Our son, feeling the tension, started to cry. “Let’s make cookies,” I said. Leading him into the kitchen, I made dough for sugar cookies. He formed little mounds of dough and flattened them, making interesting shapes as he put them on the baking sheet. The air smelled sweet. While we decorated the cookies with different colored icings, I worried about my husband. He’d been gone for hours.

When I heard banging on our apartment door I froze with fear. My husband had a key. Who could it be? Controlling my anxiety so as not to frighten my son, I went to see what was causing the noise. The front door to the house was open. My husband was standing in the hallway. “I need your help. Come with me.” I followed him outside. There on top of our beat-up old station wagon was the biggest tree I’d ever seen. I stared at him. He said, more than a little defensive, “It was in a lot, leaning up against a wall. No one wanted it.”

“I can see why. How’d you get it on top of the car?”


“A guy came by and offered to help. Can we stop talking and get the tree into the house?” I put on a jacket and told our son to watch through the French door windows. Struggling with its size and weight, we managed to drag it on to the porch. I opened the French doors and he pushed as I pulled until we got the tree into the house.

The tree was so large, despite the 14’ ceilings in our living room, he had to cut about eight inches off the top. “How are we going to keep it upright?” I asked, more than a little dismayed by its size.

“I found some boards on the lot. I’ll nail them to the bottom of the tree.” Easier said than done.

When we finally got the tree up my husband did not look happy. “We gotta decorate it. How we gonna do it?” We had no tree decorations, but even if we had money to buy some, by now all stores were closed.

“We could hang cookies on the tree with the red shoestring licorice I bought.” He looked doubtful. This was not his idea of a decorated Christmas tree. “I’ll make holes in the cookies. You get the ladder.”

My husband stood on the top rung. He bent down so our son could give him the largest cookie to hang on the top. We’d made so many cookies there were enough to hang on most of the branches. Using red thread, I made chains of cranberry and popcorn. 

My husband looked a bit less unhappy. 

I brought in a tray with cups of hot cocoa and cookies.

Our son looked at the tree with such joy he began to laugh and sing. “It’s not a Christmas tree, it’s a Cookiemas tree.” He was so delighted with himself he started dancing in front of the tree singing, “Cookiemas. Cookiemas. Come and eat the Cookiemas tree . . .” 

Our son’s reaction was contagious. We drank our cocoa and munched on cookies. All of us, especially my husband, feeling a lot happier than we’d been a few hours earlier.

Cookiemas became our family tradition.  


If you have a tradition or ritual, how did it begin?

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JAN 2024 Monthly Stories