Louise T. Guinther

Back in the ’70s, one of our family rituals at holiday time was poring over the Swiss Colony catalogue and picking out gifts for our far-flung relatives. Not being billionaires, we usually opted for a modest cheese-and-sausage combo, or a single dobosh torte, but I remember gazing longingly at the “V.I.P. Towers” in the back half of the catalogue. These were great colorful totem poles of stacked boxes and tins containing a vast variety of delectables, and even from the outside, they made one’s mouth water.

The Swiss Colony is still going strong, and the goodies they sell for the holidays and year-round are as wonderful as ever. But when it comes to Christmas cookies, there’s nothing like making your own. A few years ago, wanting to conserve table space, I took up piling all the tins of homemade Guinther specialties into a V.I.P. tower of our own. This year, although we made the same lineup of cookies as usual, the tower seemed particularly imposing, and I thought we could give the catalogues a run for their money.

Every baker who celebrates Christmas has his or her signature cookie collection. My family makes 9 varieties, some quick and easy, some requiring artistic creativity and a massive time commitment. The most fun (and complicated) are the stained-glass window cookies, made with hard-candy crumbs that melt in the oven as the cookies bake. The recipe was a clever invention of the Life Saver company some time in our early youth. We actually still have the official printed piece of paper. (Wonder what that would be worth on the Antiques Road Show.) The window cookies get the prize for degree of difficulty, beauty and messiness. In all these decades of making them, we have come up with no better method of crushing the candies than whacking them with a hammer. As you may imagine, this shoots tiny shards of sugar all over the kitchen. In the early years, we mostly stuck with the simple recommended patterns that came with the recipe, but over the years, the designs have gotten more and more elaborate. My father used to make cathedral-like rose windows, and we’ve even gone so far as to represent a triptych with manger scene.

The final touch in our house is displaying the whole array of cookies on our favorite Christmas-tree plate, so that the more you eat, the more you are rewarded with the beauty of the dish. The emptying and refilling of that cookie tray is a win-win: almost like having your cake and eating it too.