Flashback Friday # 167

The Christmas Cookie

Greetings one & all. Welcome to another post about stuff that happened to me many moons ago.

As my title suggests, this post is about the wonderful tradition of giving cookies to someone at Christmas. However, this post isn't about the cookies we made. It is about a cookie that Dad got from one of our relatives.

Frequent readers of my blog know Aunt Shelly. She was as pious as one could get. There are times that she would make a Quaker feel worldly next to her. There were other times when her piety went right out the window. There a word for that, but we weren't allowed to say it in our house (at least in hearing distance of Mom). This story is about one of the "Bad Shelly" moments.

Mom always gave Aunt Shelly's family several dozen cookies (with 14 kids, a dozen just wouldn't do). Aunt Shelly decided to do a little baking of her own. She made a special cookie, just for Dad.

When they came over, she handed Dad a wrapped box and told him to unwrap it. It was a check box with one cookie in it. But this was no ordinary cookie. This was a Santa cookie. An anatomically correct Santa.

Dad thought it was hilarious. He kept that cookie for years, tucked inside the little box he came in. He would bring it out to show his friends who hadn't seen it before. It was a prized possession to him.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. Since we lived in the country, we always had problems with mice. Our house was nearly 100 years old, so it wasn't the snuggest. One winter a mouse decided to chew through the box to eat the contents. The mouse didn't eat all of it. Santa's head was gone. In more ways than one.