InnerCella Open Table: Reflections of Home
noses and eyes. It was a creative but time-consuming task, as the small size of the cookie cutters relative to the large amount of dough yielded tins and tins of cookies, which we would share with neighbors and friends. After my mother passed away in 1976, I carried on the tradition of making and sharing the Moravians, as we called them. My best friend, Terri, and her family were especially avid fans of these treats, and one Christmas Day I took a big tin of cookies over to Terri’s house, intending to present it to her mother. The moment I walked in the door, however, Terri’s younger sister Erin relieved me of the tin with a mischievous smile, promising to deliver it to her mother. Erin and the cookies disappeared into the small living room crowded with relatives, and every last crumb in the tin was devoured before my gift reached the other side of the room. To my chagrin, Terri’s mom, who was busy in the kitchen, never tasted a single cookie that day! Our live Christmas tree bore another Moravian heirloom, a multi-pointed Moravian star, representing the Star of Bethlehem. Because there was a little white light that tucked inside the open bottom of the paper star, it could not be placed on the tree until all the lights were strung—a
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comedy of errors in our house. My father was fastidiously neat, so I never understood why, when he unpacked the tree lights every year, they emerged in one big, tangled mass. In an attempt to unravel them, he would lay the strands across the living room floor, like an inextricably knotted necklace. Once he had them nearly untangled, our beagle, Daisy, would trot across the room as if on cue, innocently stepping all over the lights and invoking a string of expletives from Dad. My brother and sister and I found this hilarious, but learned to stifle our laughter, as Dad, in his frustration, never seemed to see the humor. After the lights were finally wrapped around the tree and before any other ornaments were added, Dad would crown the topmost branch with the Moravian star. I always loved seeing that star beaming faithfully atop the tree, a bright symbol of constancy and family.
After I was married, my father gave me my own star one Christmas, which he had ordered from the Moravian Bookshop in Bethlehem. Mine is also a paper star, and I carefully free it from its popcorn-lined box every Christmas so my husband, Joe, can attach it to the top of our tree. A couple of years ago, I visited the Moravian Bookshop in Old Salem (a Moravian settlement established in 1772) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in hopes of finding another paper star. I was disappointed to see that Moravian stars are made of plastic now, and when I asked, I was told that the artisan who made the paper stars passed away years ago. So, I cherish my delicate Moravian star, as much as I preserve (in a plastic sleeve) the original yellowed recipe for Moravian cookies, which Mom clipped from the December 1964 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. These are traditions that I hold dear, the ones that stoke warm memories of Christmas past.
I couldn’t imagine the holidays without making Moravian cookies, treats tied to my father’s hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
at Home
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