There is one cookie cutter that I kept. It’s my favorite- a lovely heavy copper one in the shape of a hand, with a heart cut out of the palm (it’s a really a set of two, a large hand and a small heart.) It’s not really a Christmas one, but I always make it every chance I get. I found it in a little store somewhere, I don’t even remember where… but it struck a chord, and I loved it the minute I saw it. If I ever wondered why this love for cookie cutters, and why this special love for this particular cookie cutter, I think I found my answer in this story my mother wrote about her grandmother Esther:

“She spoiled all her grandchildren and used to make us the most delicious fudges wrapped in silk papers after having been rolled in granulated sugar. She also used to bake cookies in the shape of a hand and our delight was to eat one finger at a time because the fingers had nails covered with pink frosting.”

My mother Marie-José Salgado Lemoine never made hand-shaped cookies – not that I remember – and I only read this story years after buying the cookie cutter… after my mother died, and we found among her things a pamphlet of family stories that she had written down for her grandchildren. I read about great-grandmother Esther and her hand-shaped cookies a day or two after my mother’s death (three years ago, on December 8). At the time I was too emotional to really register the meaning of the story.

It has been three years since my mother died, and I have had time to grieve, and read and reread her words. She is with me always, but particularly during the month of December. At this last reading, the story of the hand cookies was the jewel in the box. My great-grandmother Esther Naar Nadreau was the daughter of a Jewish man, Jacob Naar, and she made cookies for her grandchildren in the shape of a Hamsa. That symbol has always resonated with me. When my daughter and her husband moved back to California near us, I got her a beautiful Hamsa for her front door, that I decorated with braided charms and stones. Again I’d walked into a store and been struck by this hand! Talk about gene memories! So I have decided to revive great-grandmother Esther’s cookie tradition. That’s why I’m keeping the Hand Cookie Cutter – from now on, every year, I’m making hand-shaped cookies with pink-frosted fingernails! The heart in the open hand is my addition – maybe one day my great grandchildren will remember me as the one who added the heart to the hand…

I’m going to give them out on New Year’s Day, Haitian Independence Day, after we eat the traditional bowl of Soup Joumou. Just reviving an old family cookie tradition!