If you’re going to preside over a Christmas cookie club for more than 45 years, you’ll occasionally need to rule with an iron fist inside your oven mitt.
“This one woman, I’ll never forget, she brought her cookies — a dozen for (each member) — in one big bag. Not in boxes or separate bags. So we had to sit there and find cookies that would not be broken,” Evie Schild Hart says in the kitchen of her Henderson home.
“We didn’t invite her back the next year.”
This was in 1979, the club’s inaugural year, and Evie, who’ll turn 88 in December, recalls the slight as though it happened yesterday
.
Shortbread or bust
Things started simply enough with a small group of women in Garden Grove, California, getting together around the holidays to exchange cookies.
But, as the woman with the garbage bag filled with crumbs showed them, their cookie club needed rules.
No matter how much you may want the first rule of cookie club to be “you do not talk about cookie club,” it’s actually, “you must provide copies of your recipe.”
If anyone forgets, Evie will hound them for it. Then she’ll type it up and place it between plastic sheets in the binder that holds the recipes for every cookie that’s ever been served to the club.
That first year, there was English shortbread, English toffee cookies, sugar cookies, cookies filled with preserves, peanut clusters, peanut brittle and knockoff Reese’s peanut butter cups.
Evie made the shortbread, a decision that would grow to haunt her.
“It’s a good shortbread,” she says — possibly too good. Since that initial year, “it seems like everybody says, ‘You are going to make shortbread next year, aren’t you?’ ”
“She’s sort of roped into that every year. Like it or not,” says her daughter, Sharon Willis.
Over the club’s 45 annual meetings, Evie figures she’s had to make that shortbread 30, maybe 35 times. There are plenty of recipes she’s longing to bake. She created what she calls “I Love You” cookies out of Honey Bunches of Oats, coconut, cranberries, oatmeal and, occasionally, nuts. She’d love to share them with the club, but she’s always told “too bad.”
“The cookie club women will never know the deliciousness of the ‘I Love You’ cookie,” Sharon says. She speaks softly and sweetly in the manner of a host of a puppet-filled children’s television show from the 1950s.
“Well,” Evie responds, “that’s not my fault.”
Once you’re in, you’re in
That first year, there were seven women, including Beverly Morrison, Evie’s co-founder who was often pressured to make peanut brittle.
The membership was capped, and a waiting list was established, in 1980 once it grew to 12 women. Anything more than that would have been unwieldy thanks to another club rule: You must bake a dozen cookies for each member, including yourself, and another dozen to share at the party.
Sharon didn’t make the cut until a spot opened up in 1983, the year she turned 16.
Once you’re in the cookie club, it’s a lifetime appointment. Members can leave at any time, but there’s no such thing as taking a year off. Barring illness or something very serious, if they can’t participate, they’re moved to the back of the waiting list and the next member up takes their place.
Beverly remained in the club until her death in 2018. Sharon and her husband, Don, retired to Henderson that year with their sons, Jack and James. Evie and her sister, Gwen Culp, followed in 2019, kicking off a new era of the cookie club.
Food traditions run in the family
If there’s a service organization or a social group having a gathering in Evie’s corner of Henderson, there’s a good chance she’ll make the dinner. Then she’ll make dinner for the volunteers who helped make the first dinner.
Evie’s from North Tonawanda, New York, just outside Niagara Falls.
“You can only go 25 miles an hour through town,” she says. “If you go any faster than that, you will get a ticket. Trust me. The mafia’s back there, and you will get a ticket.”
Her father, Lorenzo LaJoie, had a restaurant there. Once the family moved to Southern California in 1959, he opened a diner in Long Beach.
Evie has made his salad dressing as a party favor for the cookie club. She still uses her great-great-grandmother’s recipe for molasses sugar cookies that dates back to 1869. Evie also taught Sharon how to cook and bake. Asked how old she was when she started, though, Sharon says she doesn’t know.
“Oh, yes, you do,” Evie interjects. “You started making lefse” — soft Norwegian flatbread — “when you were about 8 years old when Grandma came over.”
In addition to cookies, Evie makes a mean version of Claim Jumper’s bran muffin. In 1994, she won a blue ribbon for it at the Orange County Fair. She left with eight other blue ribbons that year, including ones for white bread, cinnamon rolls and three varieties of cookies.
She also crochets and won blue ribbons that year for a sweater, a doily and a set of sheets and pillowcases. Evie should have made it an even 10 blue ribbons with the Chanel-style suit she crocheted for Sharon.
“They said she would’ve won, but the arms were too long,” Sharon recalls, laughing. “I took personal offense.”
The big day
Around 1 p.m. on the Sunday before Christmas — or, if that’s too close to Dec. 25, the Sunday before that — members arrive at Sharon’s house.
They place a dozen of their cookies, wrapped together with the recipe attached, into each of the 12 baskets that line the entryway. The 13th dozen goes on the table that’s set with Sharon’s Christmas dishes.
After a Champagne toast, each person talks about their cookie as the members take a bite. Secrets and tips are shared, then it’s on to the next member and their cookie. The gathering is often the only time all year some of the members see each other.
Coffee and tea are served. Ornaments are exchanged. A “silly game” is played. By 3 p.m., the party’s over, and everyone leaves with a staggering 144 cookies.
If you were to eat one of those cookies every hour on the hour, setting alarms for the overnight shift, it would take you six full days to finish them off.
Bake it easy
So what makes for a good cookie club cookie?
“I think the only thing we always say is, we want more of a special cookie. We don’t want chocolate chip,” Sharon says. “You know, something maybe a little special, but it doesn’t have to be hard.”
Unlike some of the club’s rules, the anti-chocolate chip sentiment was always more of a suggestion. Still, it held firm until Patti Gilmour made them in 2022 and 2023, her only years in the club before she died.
“She made these little, tiny silver-dollar chocolate chip cookies with little mini chocolate chips,” Sharon says, “and they were delicious.”
Anything involving rolled dough and cookie cutters is too time consuming, she says, and it’s best to stay away from sandwich cookies. One year, Sharon started making them and didn’t realize until she was halfway through that, instead of 13 dozen cookies, she’d need to make 26 dozen to complete the sandwiches.
“The perfect cookie club cookie,” Sharon says, “is something easy, you can make a lot out of one batch, and it’s special.”
Even the easy recipes consume a full afternoon. Evie won’t start baking until all 13 dozen are on cookie sheets, and she’ll only bake one sheet at a time. If you put one sheet on the top rack and one on the bottom, she notes, they won’t come out the same because the heating elements are different.
It should go without saying that whatever cookie you decide to make, it can’t come prepackaged in a roll for you to cut up and pop in the oven.
Perhaps that should’ve been said. Maybe it ought to have been a rule. Because that lack of communication was part of a chain of events that nearly shook the cookie club to its foundations.
‘You have to have standards’
The club has survived the death of countless members. It’s soldiered on through wars, multiple recessions and the relocation from California. COVID-19 couldn’t even derail it, as the 2020 meeting carried on without so much as additional space between the members.
The greatest threat to the cookie club’s existence came from within.
“One gal, I won’t say names, she had, like, paper plates,” Sharon says, remembering one of the club’s darkest days. “And some person used Slice ’n’ Bake Pillsbury cookies.”
Back then, club members took turns hosting the exchange, and a wealthy first-year member volunteered.
“Her house was decorated like Beverly Hills,” Evie recalls.
But her table, to everyone’s horror, was set with those paper plates.
“The funniest thing about Paper Plate Lady,” Sharon says, just above a whisper, “is she’s so fancy. … It was very surprising to see paper plates at Paper Plate Lady’s.”
Paper Plate Lady, in turn, brought in Slice ’n’ Bake Cookie Lady and her blasphemous treats.
“You can’t slice them,” Sharon says of cookie club cookies. “You have to have standards.”
“When you say homemade cookies,” Evie seconds, “it’s homemade cookies.”
Still, both Paper Plate Lady and Slice ’n’ Bake Cookie Lady were welcomed back. Ol’ Slice ’n’ Bake even offered to host the following year’s gathering but ultimately dropped the ball. That’s when Sharon claimed permanent hosting duties.
“You could see how it was starting to unravel,” Sharon says of the club in that terrible year.
“Another couple of years,” Evie concurs, “and it would’ve been no more.”
Those two ne’er-do-wells left of their own accord.
Forgive, but don’t forget
“Everybody’s so nice,” Sharon says of the current members. “I mean, some years some people’s cookies definitely aren’t, you know, that good. Or they’re ugly. (If) something happens, nobody says anything.”
The past couple of years, she’s handed out bottles of homemade vanilla as party favors. This year, she’s planning to make Evie’s famous seasoning and distribute it in small Mason jars.
They’ll be labeled “Seasonings Greetings.”
Despite the rules and high standards, Evie insists they’re just looking out for this club that’s become such a big part of their lives.
“We’re just normal people,” she says, “having a good cookie exchange.”
That’s a good exchange of cookies, not necessarily an exchange of good cookies.
“If your cookies aren’t good,” Sharon asserts, “you will be welcomed back the next year.”
At this point, images of the woman hauling that bag of broken cookies like a low-rent Santa all those many years ago must be flashing through Evie’s mind.
She’s going to have to correct her daughter.
“Only that one lady,” Evie says. ◆
