The Cookie Swap

Today, crankyjewishguy (CJG) is going to cheat a bit and dip into the archive. You see, tonight is Debbie's famous cookie swap, an annual holiday tradition that involves copious quantities of sugar and butter. CJG first wrote about Debbie's cookie swap in 2005 for The Boston Globe. Why does Debbie's cookie swap make CJG cranky? Because it means our kitchen is going to be a disaster area all day as Judy works feverishly to make hundreds of cookies for tonight's swap. And since CJG hates clutter and messes and is compulsive, he will be cleaning the kitchen with industrial strength cleaners while Judy is out eating cookies. CJG is also cranky because Judy will bring home tens of thousands of calories in the form of cookies made by other people, some of which will be very tempting. So here it is:

Every year around the holidays, my wife, Judy, gets invited to at least one cookie swap. A cookie swap is the social equivalent of the fruitcake: a lot of people give them, but most people dread them.

What? No Hannukah cookies?

The premise of a cookie swap is that every woman should seek to gain at least 20 pounds before making a New Year’s resolution to lose 20 pounds. It works like this. One woman, and let’s just make up a name and call her Debbie, invites about twenty other women to her house one evening before Christmas. Each invited guest is asked to bring a dozen home-baked cookies for each of the other guests, who, in turn, are also bringing a dozen home-baked cookies for each of the other guests. Now, let’s do the math and, for the purposes of the math, let’s count Debbie as a guest. That means that Judy will bring 252 home-baked cookies to Debbie’s house and will return home with 252 cookies baked in someone else’s home, hopefully under sanitary conditions.

Now that’s a lot of cookies, especially because all of them are made with massive quantities of butter. But, Debbie (again, I want to stress that Debbie is a completely fictitious character) usually isn’t the only one to engage in this romantic 1950s era holiday tradition. In fact, a friend of ours has been invited to no fewer than seven cookie swaps this year. If there are twenty guests at each, she’s going to be baking almost 1,800 cookies this season. Of course, I would advise our friend to simply bring the cookies she gets at one cookie swap to the next one until everyone ends up with the cookies she originally baked. But since nine out of the ten guests are likely to have been at the previous cookie swap our friend could easily be outed for this most serious breach of cookie swap etiquette.

I dread cookie swaps, too, even though I’m never invited and I don’t bake. I dread them for two reasons. First, because by the time Judy finishes baking her cookies for the cookie swaps our kitchen looks like the final, climatic scene from Ghostbusters. The devastation is everywhere and usually so is the butter, and given my low tolerance for chaos, I’m the guy who has to clean up after the parade. Second, how’s a man to keep his figure with all those cookies floating around? To be honest, most of the cookies that find their way home from these affairs aren’t all that appetizing. I hate little butter cookies with a dollop of raspberry jam on them. But I do like the little Christmas tree ones with those multi-colored sprinkles.

All this cookie swapping also begs a larger philosophical question. If men had holiday swaps, what exactly is it they would swap? Golf balls come to mind, as do certain video tapes. Lacking imagination, men might also opt for swapping money. Each guest would bring each other guest $100 and come home with exactly the same amount of money, just in different bills. Come to think of it, the host, being a man, would probably take a commission.

You see, men approach the holidays with a certain grim determination to just get through them, not with that special holiday cheer required to pull off a cookie swap. Thrown willy-nilly into awkward social situations with people dressed in sweaters that can only be worn during the two week period immediately before Christmas, assaulted by countless “assembly required” holiday gifts, and heavily laden with credit card debt and cookies made with large quantities of butter most men, given the choice, would crawl into a small cave to await the first sign of spring which, of course, is the day pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

Next year, however, I am going to suggest that Judy and her friends try something new -- a stuffing swap just before Thanksgiving. That, it seems to me, would be far more practical. Everyone loves stuffing.