For the love of cookies
It was the precious whim of a 2-year-old that started the holiday tradition at JoAnne Kruger’s house 50 years ago.
With daughters ages two years and six months, Kruger and her family were temporarily transferred from Spokane to Seattle. On a foggy wet morning in December, she found a recipe in the newspaper for pepparkakar, a Swedish gingerbread cookie. Because she was a second-generation Swede and because she had all of the ingredients in the cupboard, she decided to bake a batch of cookies with the help of two-year-old Dianne.
The recipe called for chilling overnight, but a child can’t wait. So after a short stint in the freezer, they began rolling the sticky dough. Using a gingerbread boy cookie cutter, and with her mother’s gentle guidance, Dianne pressed the cookies out of the dough. They gave the boys raisins eyes and a red hot mouth. While the girls napped, Kruger dressed them with frosting in shorts with a beanie and a wisp of blond hair, Kruger wrote.
When the cookies were done, Kruger decided it might be a nice way to meet their new neighbors. So with the baby Cindy in her arms and Dianne carrying the basket they knocked on doors, introduced themselves and gave away cookies to the children they met.
By the next Christmas, the family was back in Spokane. And one day while Kruger was baking her daughter remembered last year’s deliveries and asked if they could give away cookies again.
“It surprised me … that she remembered, but how does a mother say ‘no’ to a request like that?”
That’s how it began. Even more surprising is what it’s become.
Each December, Kruger still makes the gingerbread cookies. But now she’s delivering more than 500 cookies each year, to a third generation of recipients. (Now there are gingerbread boys and girls. The girls were first cut out by hand around a cardboard template, until Kruger later found a company to make the cutter based on her design).
Her three children get boxes each year, along with her husband’s three children in their blended family. And there are 15 great grandchildren and two great-granddaughters to remember, along with the children and grandchildren of friends and former co-workers. The Ronald McDonald House has received a box of Kruger’s cookies for the past 20 years. Kruger has a file folder filled with the names and addresses so no one is forgotten.
She confessed she sometimes bakes herself into a daze, losing track of time as she rolls and cuts and frosts. One year when her husband returned early from a business trip and she asked why he was home so soon, she discovered she’d baked through the night. He still sends her to bed when she’s stayed up too late.
Even the finicky cookie dough has never discouraged Kruger. It tends to stick if it gets too warm, so she turns off the heat in the kitchen, puts on her sweat suit and rolls the dough on a cold stone slab to make it cooperate.
And that’s not all. Her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren get 10 or 12 other varieties of childhood favorites in addition to the gingerbread goodies.
Why?
Kruger says her own mother never made cookies. “So I guess it’s kind of my way of getting even.”
But more than that, Kruger loves seeing the little ones who look forward to her cookies, she enjoys the chance to visit with people she hasn’t seen all year and she wants people to know how special they are.
“You can’t buy friendship or love, either one. This is just my way of repaying them.”