Sometimes it’s hard to save snacks for Santa

BY EILEEN BRADY
​THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas.
And I’m not talking about pine.
We have never had a fresh-cut tree, but we have always had fresh-baked cookies around Christmastime. So the scent of sugar, flour and eggs wafting from the oven is a major sensory tradition in our family. 
And then, each year, Christmas cookies become the driving force for New Year’s resolutions. But let’s not think about that now.
It seems that each geographic region we’ve lived in celebrates with its own particular Christmas cookies, and I’m often surprised when someone has never tasted a cookie that’s considered a staple in other places. 
We made snickerdoodles two years ago for my daughter’s teacher in Virginia, who fell in love with them and had to have the recipe. I hadn’t know there was a person on the planet who hadn’t eaten a snickerdoodle. Surely they aren’t an Ohio-bred Christmas cookies, a la buckeyes, are they?

I know buckeyes are technically candy, but they count as Christmas cookies in the Buckeye State. They’re all sweets, as they’d say in England. Buckeyes have been present at our Ohio Christmases since the 1980s, when my sisters-in-law began bringing them to my parents’ house. They were even on my daughter’s Christmas wish list when she was 7 and living far from Ohio. That year, along with a Barbie and an electric toy train, she wrote to Santa requesting “penut butter buckeyes.”
We have introduced buckeyes to many folks, occasionally bringing along a real buckeye nut for illustrative purposes. Some have known them as their fully dipped cousins, the chocolate balls, but a few people didn’t always quite get the “buckeye” part.
In North Carolina, I tasted my first Moravian sugar cookies from a bakery in Winston-Salem. Super thin and super yummy, they come in all kinds of flavors — ginger, lemon, pumpkin spice — but my favorite is the classic sugar cookie. Their thinness convinces me that a dozen Moravians would be the caloric equivalent of one thick, frosted sugar cookie. 
In Illinois, the newspaper’s food editor started a cookie contest, and the hardship duty of serving as a judge fell to me. So many cookies to eat in one day; such a terrible job. All day, plates of cookies would materialize in the newsroom. Most were incredibly delicious — the best of each baker’s repertoire — although a few were not quite, um, edible. 
Those must have been the ones that weren’t made with love.
It was during one of those contests a decade ago that I first tasted chocolate hidden-cherry cookies, now one of my all-time favorites. Mmm ... maraschino cherries in a chocolate-cookie nest, buried under a blanket of milk chocolate.
My relatives in New York City relied mostly on the neighborhood Italian bakeries for their Christmas cookies, but my mother remembers her aunts all heading out to her grandmother’s house in Brooklyn to make struffoli, round pieces of fried dough that were dipped in honey and sprinkles. The women would make mounds of them, which might later be dunked in coffee.
My friend Roselee, whom I met in North Carolina, also hailed from a New York Italian family. Each year, she’d allow me to focus solely on making buckeyes while she whipped up about 42 varieties of Christmas cookies, including several Italian specialties. Her rainbow cookies — an elaborate layering of colored sponge cake, almond and chocolate — are treasured in my house as if they were stuffed with beluga caviar.
Each year in Virginia, my neighbor Ingrid would host a cookie-exchange party, and the platters of gorgeous confections set off glucose monitors all over town. One of Ingrid’s recipes was called Terribly Terrific Toffee, an easy-to-make concoction of butter, brown sugar, chocolate chips and saltine crackers. It is so addictive, it has all but been renamed Christmas Crack and should come with its own 12-step program.
My friend Yung makes the world’s most delicious almond cookies, which my family has meted out to make them last as long as possible. Our new neighbor Ashley, an excellent baker, brought goodies Tuesday night that were decimated by Wednesday. My sister-in-law Jennifer’s snickerdoodles are snickerlicious. Karen’s peppermint bark is a must-make each year. Jan’s mother-in-law’s almond roca is divine, made with a process that is as daunting to me as nuclear fusion.
Last year, I was searching online for a new recipe to take to Ingrid’s cookie party when I stumbled upon a recipe by an 84-year-old woman whose name was the same as my daughter’s. The woman’s lemon ricotta cookies had won a prize in a newspaper cookie contest. And the cookies were Italian. All signs pointed to a winning recipe.
The cookies were delicious. They won the best-tasting award at the cookie party in Virginia. They’re a keeper for the family lineup each year.
And soon I’ll be hosting my own cookie exchange, on the lookout for the next sugary masterpiece.