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PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE | These sisters can’t wait for Christmas baking magazines
These ‘pastry tarts’ love their holiday cookie magazines
By Kathy Dean
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An appreciation for sweets runs in our family, so my sister Marge Tackes and I came naturally to our love of pastries.
We grew up on the south side of Chicago, where we were surrounded by familyowned bakeries filled with the delicacies from their owners’ heritage — Italian, Polish, Czech, Irish. And, of course, there was always baking at home during the holidays. Our mother made cranberry nut breads and Grandma baked kifle, a Hungarian fruit-filled cookie.
After a trip to a bakery or cupcake shop, it doesn’t take us much time to devour the goodies we’ve brought home, often before anyone else in the house even knows we’ve snuck them in. We jokingly refer to ourselves as “pastry tarts.”
Through the years, we started collecting Christmas cookie magazines. “It’s an obsession, addiction,” Marge said. “But I prefer to call it our tradition.”
The holiday cookie issues are available only once a year. “They’re pretty and colorful and stir up such visions of ideal holiday moments,” Marge said. “We buy three to five new magazines every year. We call each other at the first sighting of the new crop, usually in late September or early October.”
The two of us try to get together and bake holiday cookies for friends and family, but the collecting really is less about recipes and more about drooling over the pictures. Marge and I are happy to plunk down $10 to $15 per issue to take them home and pore over them. Holiday cookie magazines are our porn.
It all started with a 1981 issue of Woman’s Day Great Holiday Baking magazine. I honestly don’t believe that there’s a worthwhile recipe in the magazine, but the photos are spectacular!
“I swear they sometimes call my name,” Marge said. “Right there on the cover — perfection, sexy. I buy it and hurry home. I sit down and take out my treasure and stare at the picture, a glistening, sugarcovered pinwheel cookie.”
To justify the cost, we make a point to try one or two new recipes every year. Sometimes the cookies only grace the table once – like Snowy Pinecones, an acquired taste made from Nutella and fish-shaped crackers, or the Bavarian Cookie Wreaths that were so delicate they crumbled as we tried to decorate them.
“We make standards, as well as more exotic cookies, then box them up and give them as gifts to family and friends,” Marge explained. “Sugar cookies? Always a hit. Rosemary shortbread? Not so popular.”
We’ve unearthed a few notable keepers: Jumbo Brownie Cookie, Cheddar Cookies — made with cheese and ground red pepper — and last year’s Kahlua Fudge.
There are memories that have lasted, too, like one Christmas baking get-together that started with a full bottle of Midori, a melon-flavored liqueur. I don’t remember why we got it; it may have been an ingredient for one of the cookies. Marge and I started sipping it while we were baking. At the end of the day, the bottle was empty and we stood in the kitchen, a bit unsteadily, wondering why there were so
Left to right, Marge Tackes and Kathy Dean with a sampling of their cookie magazine collections.
PHOTO BY KAY TACKES.
Marge Tackes
few finished cookies.
Another year, one of the magazines featured candymaking. We both love caramels, and I volunteered Marge to take the lead on that, “which resulted in stirring sugar for what seemed like hours, and in the end was just a sticky mess,” she said.
That magazine went to the bottom of the pile.
There was another December when we invited a few friends to my sister’s cottage in Michigan for a baking extravaganza. We were rolling dough, stirring batters and had the oven going full blast when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten all day and was starting to feel queasy from all ingredients I’d been sampling.
I decided I wanted to make up some soup from scratch, so I began clearing space to cook. “It caused more than a few tense moments, battling at the stove with broth dripping onto the Cranberry Chip Bars,” Marge said.
There were battle cries of “Don’t get your soup on my cookies!” and “Don’t get your cookies in my soup!” Neither soup nor cookies were harmed,
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and the following Christmas, I gave Marge an apron to commemorate the event.
Marge recalled another year, when “we decided to share our holiday cookie joy with all Kathy’s friends and made it a kind of party for people to stop by and taste some of our fabulous creations. What we didn’t realize was that she would have to play hostess. It was her house in her town and her friends.
“So that left me basically chained to the oven for hours, trapped in the kitchen, cranking out cookie after cookie with only a creepy, out of work ‘poet’ to keep me company. I was not exactly feeling the ‘good will towards men’ that Christmas.”
A few weeks ago, I got a text from Marge: “I’m at the grocery store and I just spotted a Christmas cookie magazine! First sighting of the season!”
The next day, I sent her a follow-up text with a photo featuring four Christmas cookie magazines, and a fifth on Christmas baking.
She decided to only pick up two of the five magazines.
“I have to curb my ‘tradition’ a bit before I end up a sad story about a woman killed in her own home, crushed underneath an avalanche of Christmas cookie magazines,” Marge said.
“I now try to be more discerning. I look at them through suspicious eyes because the magazine can be full of the same old recipes with a new cover. I’ve been fooled before,” she continued.
“Seriously, how many different gingerbread cookie variations can there be? You would be stunned!”
