The Tale of Tara's Cookies
Or why homemade gifts mean so much than store-bought.
Several years ago, my friend Tara showed up at my door bearing a large tin of homemade Christmas cookies—and it wasn’t just one kind of cookie. It was an array of cookies that she’d clearly spent hours making and decorating. My family was delighted, and those cookies disappeared within a day, but what has remained is my astonishment at her gesture.
Tara was (and still is, though she moved away) one of the most impressive women I’ve ever met. She was a family physician, running her own practice, a mother of three kids who played high-level sports and traveled all over the province for training and games, and an active member of several volunteer committees. She cared for an elderly parent in a city two hours away and managed her own rental properties. Her husband worked out of town.
She was, in other words, busy on a scale that I could hardly comprehend—and yet, somehow, she made time to bake large quantities of cookies from scratch (with her kids’ help), package them beautifully, and then deliver them to her closest friends. If anyone had an excuse not to bake, it would be her; and yet, she did it. Why? Because, in her view, it mattered. It was as valid an endeavour as any other that filled her day.
The effect on me, as a recipient of those cookies, was profound. I was honoured that I’d made it onto her (surely enormous) to-do list. It’s not that I doubted the strength of our friendship—we communicated and saw each other frequently—but I would have assumed that she had much more urgent things to do than make me cookies.
In contemplating that act of generosity, I realized two things. The first is that we rarely give the gift of time and effort to our friends and loved ones. In a consumerist culture, it’s easy to pay for a physical gift and present it as a token of our affection, but things are relatively cheap and abundant. Far rarer is a gift that is the product of someone’s skilled labour, which is something money cannot buy. Nowadays, a gift that represents time taken out of a busy schedule feels extra precious, almost unbelievable.
The second thing I realized is that our productivity-obsessed culture is far too caught up in prioritizing the big-ticket items, the tasks that make us money (or prevent us from losing money), that further our careers and our kids and ourselves, that look impressive on paper or on social media. We don’t give enough time to the little things that might be just as valuable.
A reader of this newsletter left a comment on a post I wrote nearly a year ago, called “Move With Purpose.” I often think about it. She was describing her grandmother, who thought productivity culture was silly:
It’s not really about doing one thing fast, so you have more time for something else. It’s about doing things that are worthwhile and doing them well. [My grandmother] was just as likely to spend an hour on a puzzle as she was to spend an hour on housework. When someone was ill, she brought them food. When a room needed painting, she painted it. When the oranges were ripe on the tree, she picked them, made orange juice, and brought bottles to every local family member. When a book was compelling, she read it to the end, and if it wasn’t, she stopped.
It is a beautiful description of someone who knows exactly what she should be doing in any given moment, who understands the mosaic of activities that comprise a life and accepts each as having inherent value, even when it might look like a waste of time to an outsider (or even to oneself). But a life devoid of these smaller, subtler actions is hardly a life worth living; it’s draining and exhausting and, ultimately, lonely, if everyone around you is conditioned to think they matter less than your job.
I think of this when my kids ask me to play a game or read a book aloud. There are always a dozen reasons why it’s inconvenient in that moment; my to-do list is endless. But then I ask myself, “What’s it all for, if not for this?” And I try to make the time—not always, but often.
I have also replicated Tara’s tradition, setting aside a full Saturday in late December for baking with my kids. We stock up on butter, sugar, and eggs, and make 5-6 types of Christmas cookies. These get packaged and delivered to our closest friends. (One year, I did deliveries on my new electric cargo bike!)
It’s far more work than buying gifts, but I enjoy it; and I also want to show my kids that labour and attention are profound acts of love. In a fast-paced world where the default answer to how everyone’s doing is “busy,” time is the more generous thing you can give someone.
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I love this post and especially the sentiment, “…labour and attention are profound acts of love.” Thanks for the important reminder.
This reminded me of two things:
1) How you do anything is how you do everything. Your words on the time and effort mattering stirred this up in particular. If the way we gift is by spending two minutes clicking on a link on Amazon and having it ship in a brown box - and paying extra for some underpaid individual to put it in one of those gift bags with a typed up gift note (or even worse, getting the email that allows you to see who sent you a gift and what it is before it arrives) - we likely make the same decisions other places in life, too.
2) I received a gift from my parents for Christmas addressed to "Jeremy Jeim" our last name misspelled by my own parents. I know I shouldn't be as hard on them, but at their age and mine, a hand-written card from them would be something I treasure far beyond the life of whatever is in this brown box.