Valentine Cookies

I don't think that we observe a lot of family traditions, but I have a personal tradition that I have enjoyed since I was a child.  I like to have frosted sugar cookies on Valentine's Day.  I remember a Valentine's Day when I was, I think, in the second grade.  My mother was "room mother" for our class and back then that meant baking a batch of cookies for class parties.  She had made frosted sugar cookies for Valentine's Day and for some reason she trusted a 7 year old to deliver a box of cookies to school.  But on the way to the school bus I either tripped and dropped the box of cookies, or I just dropped the box of cookies, and some of them broke.  I had to go back home and confess the tragedy.  My mother didn't scold, or point out that I hadn't been careful.  She just replaced the broken cookies and sent me on my way again.  And from that day, Valentine's Day is not complete for me without frosted sugar cookies.

My tradition is to use my mother's sugar cookie recipe, which makes a fairly crisp cookie which, I must say in defense of my seven year old self, does break easily.  And I use what I hope is her mother, Libbie Brown's, cookie cutter.  I picked it up the summer Calvin and I lived in the house of my grandparents Brown.  That was more than a decade after she died, but I like to think it was hers even if it wasn't.

I started making my own cookies and sharing them as Valentines in high school. My cookies always have a "conversation heart" in the middle of pink peppermint frosting.  I don't make cookies every year, but for over forty years pink frosted sugar cookies are my own special Valentine's Day tradition.