Monday evening,  we gathered for our annual cookie party.  I had made fifteen dozen pecan butter balls, placed them in baggies with a little extra confectioners sugar, wrapped them in red and green patterned tissue paper, and tucked them in decorated bags with a curly bow.  

This was my nineteenth party!  Yes I joined in 2000…but I was a late to the fun.  The club started in the 80s with just two friends mixing and stirring up cookie dough and grew to twelve. A cap was put on number of members because 13 dozen cookies is enough to make and one dozen is donated to charity. Each member gets to leave the party with eleven dozen cookies made by friends. 

 I had to wait for someone to drop out to be the cookie virgin. 

When the party first began,  the party goers would go dancing after the cookie exchange.  But we have gone from young women to early middle age to late middle age to early old.  Many of us are busily retired… taking classes, volunteering, playing golf, doing Zumba, yoga, visiting grandchildren, traveling, writing.  We have gotten divorced, been widowed, cared for and buried aging parents and children, beat cancer, remarried, had grandchildren.  Several of us left our city making room for new cookie virgins. In fact, the head cookie bitch and club originator moved to be closer to her family and grandchildren. Since then the location of the party has shifted around the members. 

I had planned to create a new cookie this year.  But alas my oven was on the fritz and would occasionally conk out.  It was too old to repair.  A new one was installed a day before it was time for me to cook for the party.  I decided to make my favorite cookie, the pecan butter balls that is my grandmother’s recipe.  It is fitting that the first thing I baked in my new oven is such a tradition in my family and is also the first recipe in my novel. 

Last night, I was reminded that one year a reporter came to our party.  The Christmas Cookie Club had just been released and she wanted to witness the inspiration for the novel’s setting, and taste some of the cookies whose recipes were included at the beginning of each chapter. 

This year, a blog in Croatia wrote about cookie clubs and the novel.

The Christmas Cookie Club series (there are three novels: The Christmas Cookie Club, A Gift for My Sister, and The Lottery) continues to garner readers and inspire cookie clubs.   Our cookie club inspires parties, and friendship, and charity around the world most recently in Croatia.  Simon and Schuster has released a sample of the audio.

It’s a commemoration of friendship and sharing as we talk, eat, sing,  share the events of the year with each other along with our love of our cooking and decorating.  Yes, year after the year the celebration is a festival of joy, love, laughter, lights and great food in spite of the rushing cold and darkness.

Together we bring light into the darkest time of the year.

Have a wonderful holiday season!  and a peaceful 2020.