Grandma as a young woman.

An inheritance of humble, extravagant love

Grandma loved to tell the story. Every time it rolled from her memory, her eyes would sparkle, and her thin, pale lips would stretch into her cheeks as if she were that small girl in her parents’ farmhouse again. “We children would wake up on Christmas morning, and every surface of our little kitchen was covered in cookies. Everywhere, cookies!”

On the table, dotting the counters, crowning the sideboard. As many cookies as her parents had managed to make from their meager supplies. The shine in Grandma’s expression as she recalled those Christmas dawns hinted at the wide eyes and dropped jaws she and her seven siblings must have had as they surveyed the marvel before them.

“For us? All this?” their expressions surely said.

Her parents stayed up late on Christmas Eve to bake for their children. The trove of sweet treasures was the only gift they could afford amid eking out a survival on their Missouri plot in the years between the First World War and the Great Depression. They would save pennies here and cups of flour there for months in order to pull off such a feat. Despite scarcity’s unrelenting press, they were able to fill their kitchen with an incorruptible wealth. Their humble act of love broke apart the gray winter morning with bright, irrepressible wonder, and echoed the miraculous gift of a Savior.

When Grandma grew up, her signature Christmas gift, known far and wide in our small town, was a mound of cookies even more generous than the piles she received. It became her ministry, her way of passing on the love once lavished upon her. Gingerbread, molasses, sugar, pecan fingers, crinkle, thumbprints. She spent months baking and freezing her batches. Come December, she packed her cookies into repurposed plastic ice cream tubs and onto trays and plates, then she put them in the hands of each person who had been on her heart and in her prayers with every pour, stir, and scoop.

The first Christmas I was old enough to receive my own personal plate of cookies, stacked with the treats she knew I loved the most, was one of the best of my life. Much like with Grandma, I wasn’t struck by the physical gift in my hands so much as the extravagant love that created it – that desire of hers to inspire the wonder her parents had given her.

When my own daughters were little, I spun my own version of my great-grandparents’ clever idea. Starting around Thanksgiving, I found hidden moments to bake, decorate and freeze cookies and other treats. My girls never saw a drop of flour on the counter. Never saw the treats squirreled away in the freezer. Never knew what came their way. On Christmas Eve, my husband and I waited until they were asleep then took the cookies out of the freezer and arranged them across our bare kitchen table.

To see the girls’ eyes that first Christmas morning! The joy that I had long imagined had been written across Grandma’s young face I saw ablaze on my children’s faces, the wide eyes, the dropped jaws.

“How did you do this?” they kept asking, voices dripping with awe.

I could almost hear my great-grandparents hum with delight and Grandma giggle like a small girl. I handed each of my daughters a container of her own to pick out the cookies she wanted, and I smiled.

My daughters “shopping” for cookies.

My daughters are teenagers now, and they still talk about those Christmas mornings and the trove of sweet treasures waiting to greet them. More importantly, they know the reason behind it.

I pray that they one day will create their own version of the clever idea originally shaped by necessity. I pray the bright wonder shines into the next generation and the one after that, in ways my great-grandparents never dreamed of. And I long for the day when I will greet them face-to-face and thank them for that inheritance of simple, incorruptible wealth.

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