It’s no secret that I hate shopping. Somehow, when I was younger and had small children, I had more time to make handmade holiday gifts than I do now that we’re empty nesters. I recently spent a day at home working on the taxes. To feel better about things, I decided to make a batch of cookies (my mother’s recipe), for the best chocolate chip cookies ever. When I went to look for the recipe, I found it in the Shenk Family Cookbook.
According to the inside cover of the Shenk Family Cookbook, we published it in 1998. It was a very simple coil bound book of our family favorite recipes at the time, and drawings to accompany them. Jane (then 10, and now 36) and I made it and we distributed it to 20 or so families we knew in town as friends and neighbors.
The production was pretty basic, but ahead of our time. We didn’t have Canva or a color copier or any way to embed photos in the pages other than really old school. We made every recipe, we photographed the dish, we mailed the film away and got back 20 copies of each recipe photo. My father-in-law (in early stages of Alzheimer’s), was able to help us with coloring some of the drawings. My mother-in-law, Shirley, always happy to take the monotonous jobs, trimmed the photos into whatever shapes we asked.
Some of the recipes are still among our family favorites. You can find the Begging For More Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe below. Another favorite is the Ginger Salad Dressing recipe. Don’t even try this recipe if you’re missing any ingredients, every single one of them is needed.
Back in those days, we made a friends and neighbors gift every year for Christmas. Another successful homemade holiday gift was a printed binder of favorite movies. We asked locally well-known people like Sam Albert, Brian Beaudoin, a few teachers, and our family members to each list their top favorite movies. This was the olden days, and I remember typing by hand all the descriptions of the movies. It was right around when DVDs first came out, and I remember buying and donating the top 10 voted favorite movies in our binder to the Forbush Memorial Library, and they were thrilled to get the donation to start their DVD collection.
Another year, Jane and I decided to make homemade candles. This had to be somewhere around 2005. What scents should we make? Jane suggested coffee scented candles. Great idea, I bought a bag of coffee beans and some candle wax! Looking back, I’m not sure how I passed the test into adulthood because if my estimated year is correct, I would’ve been 35 years old. We made large jar candles at a pretty significant expense, we made custom labels and then delivered them to our 20 friends and neighbors. A few weeks later, we lit the candle we kept for our own home. The coffee beans had sunk to the bottom during the process, so pretty much the candle smelled like nothing until the wick got low enough to hit the coffee beans, at which point the candle burst into flame. My apologies, 20 years later, to anyone who had the same candle experience.
