Cookies

Bill: You can't buy the necessities of life with cookies. You can't buy a car with cookies - am I right, Jim ?
Jim: Yes, sir, that's correct.

The above is from the almost-a-Christmas movie Edward Scissorhands. Bill, the husband of Edward's "rescuer" Peg Boggs, is attempting to convince Edward of getting better value for his varied services. (Jim is their daughter's boyfriend, kissing up to his girlfriend's dad.) Cookies contain mostly common ingredients - flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla - so they don't cost much to make, are easily given and easily accepted. This didn't make them a particularly good trade for Edward's exceptional haircuts and topiary skills.

As a child in the 1970s, it didn't seem that giving cookies at Christmas was a common event. They were around, perhaps made available by older ladies, but why would you bother? There wasn't anything to make them more worthwhile than store-bought. Fruitcakes were even less common, but there were still cultural memories of them that seemed part of an earlier era.

Are cookies at Christmas a sign of the Turnings? Or is it simply a matter of economics? Older folks who might have made cookies back then could have had a habit persisting since the Depression, of making inexpensive gifts rather than purchasing them. They could also, though, be on fixed incomes or have other incentives for this behavior. It does seem as though cookies are a bigger deal lately, presumably for economic reasons that are part of the Crisis. It could probably be proven or disproven by keeping track of how Christmas cookie recipes were available in newspapers and magazines over the last 80 or so years.