Graphic created by Lucas Seidel Design

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, walking me through the winter memories of my childhood. Not to say that I’m Scrooge - I would describe this wintery haunting as a pleasant, sought out one.

A tradition of my past and present is baking. I have a particularly longstanding relationship with cookies. As a little girl, my mother and grandmother shared my grandfather’s chocolate chip cookie recipe with me. Towards the end of his life, he had begun to notate some recipes, and this one became mine to carry forward. I took the recipe into my own hands, and have made them every year since.

Over the years, I’ve set more and more ambitious holiday baking challenges for myself - sometimes following along with The Great British Bake Off, sometimes adopting a new recipe to weave into my collection. Each December, I spend a week crafting cookie boxes filled with:

• The classic chocolate chip, my family’s heirloom
• Sugar cookies shaped like moons and stars, a little constellation of sweetness
• Chocolate snowballs (which I never get quite right)
• Bourbon-dipped gingerbread, a recent addition