KEEPSAKES
Peg and Esther’s baking sessions were a highlight of the holiday season.
Treasured cookie cutters
My parents, Peg and Earl Waggett, and I, then 5, moved from Pennsylvania to Akron, Ohio, in 1945. Within a few days, we visited what became our new church, and the first person we met was Esther Fox, who warmly welcomed us. So began Mom and Esther’s friendship, a blessing to my stay-at-home mother, who knew few people in our new community.
Esther and Mom started a tradition of spending a day during the holiday season making cookies. When I got home from school, I mixed icing for the freshly baked treats.
Surrounded by candies and colored sugar, I joyously decorated cutout Santas, Christmas trees, angels and stars until they were just right—and occasionally snacking on one or two that weren’t.
After Dad died in 1973, Mom returned to Pennsylvania, but she kept up her friendship with Esther. Mom died in 2011. The next year Esther, then 94, sent me a Christmas box of commercially prepared cookies, a touching and thoughtful gift. Then, in 2013, she sent me homemade sugar cookies with tubes of frosting. Decorating them, I savored memories of doing the same thing at the gray Formica table in Ohio all those years ago. I recalled a notation my mother had written next to Esther’s name in our address book: “A girl’s best friend.”
I still have the cookie cutters
Mom and Esther used during their baking sessions. At Esther’s 100th birthday party in 2018, I drove from central Kentucky to Akron for the celebration, bringing with me decorated cookies in the shapes of hearts, stars and angels.