The Santa cookies have always been around.
They would arrive in the mail in mid-December in a tin my grandmother had surely repurposed years ago. When I was younger, I’m not sure I even realized my grandparents made them because they were so perfect. Every single one looked and tasted just the same.
The Santa cookies themselves are tasty without being too sweet, and the icing is almost savory with a slight tinge of vanilla.
Santa’s features are applied with food coloring and a paint brush – his blue eyes and red cheeks, and his hat. The rest is white icing.
As I got older, I learned my grandparents made them.
My dad tells me it was my grandfather who made them, which surprised me because I don’t think I had ever seen him cook. But my Aunt Joan Goth wasn’t so sure about that.
“Don’t know if your dad gave you the history,” Aunt Joan texted me after I asked her if she had any old pictures of my grandfather making cookies (she didn’t – but she had stories!). “This is my version. Quite often his is different (winkie emoji).”
Aunt Joan says Grandma Goth (Helen was her first name, but she was Grandma Goth to me) actually made the cookies herself.
“Dad always put the icing on,” Aunt Joan said. “He said his hands were stronger.”
THAT part cracked me up, because my grandmother was not someone you messed with. Let’s just say if you know me, she’s where I get a lot of my ME from.
She coached boys high school basketball in the 50s. I have an amazing photo of her with some sort of animal she had just shot, standing proudly with the animal’s antlers in her manicured hands. In another old photo, she’s standing with my grandfather, arms crossed, hair freshly done — she was, you could tell, the one in charge, even if she let my grandfather think it was him from time to time.
You can see just in these photos that if someone told her her hands weren’t strong enough for something, she’d have laughed and said, Fine then. You do it!
My dad said making them always brings him back to his childhood, too.
“As kids we just loved having them around Christmastime,” he said.
My Aunt Joan said that after my grandfather added the icing, the kids (my Uncle Mike, the oldest, my dad, Tom, and Aunt Joan) would add the food coloring.
“A real family adventure,” she said.
At some point, my Aunt Vivian (Uncle Mike’s wife) started making them as well.
“She made them for Mike’s cop friends and her banker friends,” Aunt Joan said (Uncle Mike was a police officer and Aunt Vivian worked at a bank). “She was known to make 200 each year.”
In 2000, my grandmother died, and then as my grandfather got older, Uncle Mike and Aunt Vivian took over, and then eventually my dad.
My dad isn’t really a cook or a baker, but when he starts something, he finishes it. He works on the cookies with a focused precision born of love and tradition.
“The cookies just mean so much about Christmas and about what is really important about Christmas, which is the relationships we all have,” my dad said. “I know that you have good memories of the cookies when you were growing up and I really want the grandkids to have good memories as well.”
A couple times my oldest daughter tried to help, but my dad got annoyed that she wasn’t doing it right, so now he does it himself.
I do have five kids though, so maybe one of them will be precise enough to be allowed into the production line one day!
My parents move a lot, but in every house, in every different kitchen, there’s a photo of my dad working on the cookies.
My mom and dad send them out to all of our relatives on both sides of the family every year (in cute individual baggies now instead of tins, but they travel much better).
“I really hope the cookies signify what Christmas is all about as opposed to all the materialism,” my dad told me.
The Santa cookies are so famous in our family, my Uncle Gil (my mom’s brother-in-law), who is an amazing whittler, made a wooden version of the Santa cookies that we now hang on the tree every year.
“I’m so glad Tom took this project over,” Aunt Joan said. “Hopefully a following generation will pick it up.”
Below is the recipe – Aunt Joan typed it up, and my dad added the notes at the bottom. If you do make the cookies, please take a photo and email me at mgoth@linknky.com.
This Inside LINK is written by Meghan Goth, the executive editor at LINK Media. Read more Inside LINK columns from Meghan and CEO Lacy Starling here.