At the rate of 1,600 a year, plus or minus, Pauline Byrd must have made 20,800 Christmas cookies during the 13 years at least that I know of. A few days before she packed up her car to drive to New Jersey to spend the holidays with her daughter, Pauline would deliver to all her neighbors and close friends a paper plate full of cookies encased in a plastic bag tied closed by a bit of yarn or curling ribbon. She was generous in her calculation of neighborhood: it included all of us who lived on the same side of the fork heading up around the head of the island, and to qualify, all we did was move into our house.
Pauline was a great believer in starting early and freezing her products. She made sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies, rum or bourbon balls. There were meringues, some plain, some with nuggets of chocolate chips in them. There were oatmeal cookies and coconut ones. She’d make rolled-up wafers and fried rosettes dusted with confectioner’s sugar. There were spritz, and I seem to recall an anise-flavored cookie. They came rolled and cut in shapes, and dropped. Some were frosted, others had candied fruit pressed into them. There were perennial offerings, and some that seemed to be trials.
She baked and baked. Besides delivering cookies to neighbors, she took cookies to all sorts of holiday events from the Advent Candle Lighting at the up-island church to Sewing Circle. Favored friends got stollen. And Christmas wasn’t the only holiday when she took treats to neighbors. On Good Friday, yeasty hot cross buns showed up, with the frosting cross on top, set on the table inside the kitchen door if we weren’t home when she did her delivery. For the up-island church fair, she made donuts, something hardly anyone does any more.
Pauline was 77 when we moved to Islesboro, and she baked steadily on through her 80s. In fact, she did everything and anything she wanted through her 80s. A couple of years ago, when Pauline turned 90, she decided, and announced, that she would henceforth only do what she wanted, though none of us could tell how that would be different from her previous course of action. There were small signs of her slowing down. She determined, for example, that it would be necessary for her to remake her bed only every other week as long as she slept on one side of her big double bed one week, and on the other the next. She also determined she would no longer make so many cookies each year, at least not for the whole neighborhood. Still the distinctive plates full showed up at certain houses, and I was privileged to eat a couple of the last of the Pauline cookies just this past spring.
One friend wryly observed that by the time the different cookies had been in and out of the freezer, there was a kind of similarity, shall we say, in their flavor. Alas, there was some truth in that. But having come from a family of dedicated Christmas-cookie makers – my mother annually manufactured a mere 900, and my sister still makes dozens and dozens – still I admired the little plateful, and savored them. Pauline died at 92 in August, long before cookie making season. Her cookies were as welcome a sign of the holidays as a wreath on a door, or the tree on the church steps. I will miss them as surely as I miss Pauline herself.