Cookie exchanges, Part II

If you missed Part I of this exciting blog episode, please report for detention to Room...oops, just kidding. But please be sure to read yesterday's Introduction to Cookie Exchanges before reading the conclusion today, or today's discussion may not make much sense (of course, it may not make much sense anyway). We left off where I went to get a snack because all the talk about cookies was making me hungry. I'm hungry again now, of course -- it being a new day -- but I will try to stay on task here.

Yesterday you learned, among other important rules for cookie exchanges, that you should not bring Girl Scout cookies to an exchange. People often want to know (I personally have never had anyone ask me this, but I'm sure people want to know, just the same) what kind of cookies they should make for a cookie exchange. The answer is: The ones your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother used to make over in Europe, before there even was Christmas, and for which the recipe has long been lost and probably wasn't written in a language you could read anyway. If it even was written down, because as you know good cooks are always fearful of anyone stealing their best recipes, and so they never record them and sometimes cannot even remember them themselves ("Was that a teaspoon of sugar or a pound?").

If you cannot locate an ancient family recipe, the next best thing is to use one that's a little more recent in the family history, say only a few generations back. If your family is scarce on treasured recipes, you will have to resort to either making something up or flipping through a cookbook or magazine and choosing one that looks promising (I recommend the "eeny meeny miny moe" method for choosing). Ideally you should make this recipe at least once before the actual cookie exchange so that if it is a total flop, you have time to beg some Girl Scout cookies off your neighbor or sister-in-law.

In an effort to hasten our discussion of cookie exchanges to a prompt end before we all faint of hunger, I will condense the parts of the actual cookie exchange into these simple steps:

1. Take your cookies with you. They are your ticket into the exchange.
2. Take a container for the other cookies you will receive, preferably something about the size of a wheelbarrow.
3. Once all the cookies are laid out, rush madly around trying to collect as many as you can.
4. Laugh at those who were not fast enough to get their fair share.
5. Take your cookies home and hide them from your family, or better yet, eat them all before you even get home.
6. For New Year's, resolve to never eat another cookie, at least not until next year's exchange.

As a postscript, I mentioned earlier that I was once bamboozled into organizing a cookie exchange. I carefully followed all the instructions I have laid out here before you, with the unsurprising result that 2 people showed up, one of which was me. But the other lady and I had a grand time, giving each other rides in our wheelbarrows before filling them with our meager haul of 12 cookies. And because her name rhymed with mine, we composed a song about the experience (this is true) that roughly corresponded to the tune of "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas" and was titled "Have a Holly Polly Cookie Exchange." Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint -- this song, like so many of our aforementioned great-great-great-ancestors' recipes, has been lost to posterity, and neither of us ever went on to compose another hit. Sad, but true.