Come December, groups of friends, colleagues and relatives gather to share the fruits of many kitchens, divvying up dozens of homemade gingerbreads, bars, drops and jumbles for each participant's respective household and gift list.
While the holiday cookie exchange has become an increasingly popular tradition, it appears to have no specific point of origin.
"My suspicion is that cookie exchanges have been happening unofficially within families for generations," says Lucy Long, chairwoman of the foodways section of the American Folklore Society and assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University.
"Particularly in extended families living in the same place, you tend to have different members of the family specializing in different foods, so people would trade back and forth."
The contemporary version of the cookie exchange may serve as a substitute for those who don't have large extended families close by, Long says.
An annual cookie swap emerged as an offshoot of Jessica C. Brown's book club. Brown remembers as a child an entire day devoted to holiday baking with her parents, siblings and their friends. After her marriage failed, Brown, a new mother, resurrected the tradition two years ago. "It was a way for me to stay connected to my friends and to thank them for their help" at a difficult time, the Rodgers Forge resident says.
While a cookie exchange reduces labor and costs, "It's much more a way of sharing each other's identity and heritage," Long says. "What tends to happen with things like holiday cookie recipes, ... people want to bring out their very best cookie, their favorite cookies. A lot of times what is the favorite and most meaningful is what they remember from their own childhoods."
Brown's contribution to this year's exchange was pizzelles. "My Italian mother always made them, and now I even have her not-so-safe pizzelle iron to make mine." Another favorite at Brown's cookie exchange is Mandy Katz's gingerbread men.
When Keith Collora teaches a Christmas cookie class at A Cook's Table in Baltimore, he includes an easy butterscotch-cookie recipe from his mother that also works well for exchanges.
Nancy Baggett adapted a number of family recipes for her latest collection, The All-American Cookie Book (Houghton Mifflin, 2001, $35). The Ellicott City resident remembers cookie-baking sessions involving her mother, aunt and grandmother that were precursors to the contemporary cookie exchange: "Everybody would get to take away some of everything."
