Getting Ready for the Holiday Season with Vintage Baking Collectibles

One of my fondest childhood memories is of baking cookies. Every holiday season, my sister and I, along with our cousin Lisa, would spend an afternoon baking cookies with Grandma. Being doted on by Grandma was swell enough, but add to it the smell of vanilla, giggling with girls, and warm cookies, and magic is made. These memories led to my collection of kitchen and baking items.

One of the first things I hunted for was a set of brown bowls like grandma had. It wasn’t until I found my set of Mar-Crest Oven Proof Stoneware bowls and brought them home that I considered my first apartment complete.

Next, I was on to vintage cookie cutters. I had to have the tin ones like mom and grandma had. In the process, I gained other cookie cutters. Red plastic Tom & Jerry cookie cutters which were ‘before my time’, copper colored cookie cutters in shapes I’d never seen, some with wooden handles… Some were found at garage sales in baggies with the tin ones I wanted, others taken home just because they were cute. Hey, cookie cutters are practical.

Just like those old rolling pins I had to get.

And the second set of Mar-Crest bowls. (Which came with a Mar-Crest baked bean pot that I have no idea how to use even if I were interested in making beans, which I am not.)

It’s easy to justify buying back my childhood memories, but I must admit somewhere along the line I have stumbled into buying nearly anyone’s childhood baking memories.

For example, we never used a mix master to make our cookie dough. We did all the mixing and creaming by hand (in those lovely brown bowls). But some how I have a dozen vintage mixers.

(I only keep a dozen mixers a time. When I reach more than 13 – a baker’s dozen – I have to sell some off, because what good are they in boxes in the basement? Well, OK, 10 in the basement is fine. But 12? That’s insane… Right?)

But I can’t walk past them at a yard sale & ignore them. I smell the yummy vanilla, hear the sound of giggling girls, and see those girls licking frosting off their spatulas and fingers… And I must take that mixer home and let it live again.

If the end of every summer means the end of garage and yard sales, I mourn-not. For the fall means the beginning of the holiday or baking season.

I don’t bake so much for the sweets, but for the sweet memories I make with my own girls. We use the bowls, cookie cutters, rolling pins and other items which others have used, infusing them with our own giggles and memories. Every year we make the same cookies (from Grandma’s Betty Crocker New Picture Cook Book #13814), so I may not be teaching them very much about baking. But they are learning the love of tradition.

And when my step-daughter says, “I really like these brown bowls” I am awfully glad I got that second set.

Now I just need to get each girl to love mixers — a lot.