Traditions Around the Table

This time of year is filled with so many different family traditions.  Advent countdowns, decorating the day after Thanksgiving, movie marathons, and so much more. For my family, it’s apricot cookie making! Every year, we gather around my mom or sister’s kitchen island, pick out our aprons, divide jobs, and we bake. My brother is most often the dough boy, while my mom and sister fill cookies and pass them off for my nephew and I to roll in sugar and place on the tray for baking. But the most fun parts of this night aren’t just the eating of cookies, the fun aprons we come with every year, or the marking of a yearly tradition. It’s the fun and laughter we share together every Christmas around the table (or in our case the kitchen island). The simplest and smallest of cookies that every time I eat them, no matter the season, I think of my family. 

Traditions often serve as memory makers and markers. Moments in time you don’t want to forget so you carry them on from year to year. Like the first year my nephew joined the cookie making crew and ate more sugar than he put on the cookies themselves. We laughed all night as he snuck pinches of sugar into his mouth. He’s been rolling cookies in sugar every year since. Or the Christmas after my grandfather passed my sister and I had received an apron embroidered with his favorite saying , “I love you a bushel and a peck”. We both wore them as we all baked cookies together. Traditions are what bring us together and help us remember. 

This tradition is exactly what inspired the apricot cookie recipe in our Around the Table collection this season. Apricot cookies have been a family recipe passed down through the years, scribbled on papers, stained with food, and stuck in boxes. That is until last year we gifted my mom with a cookie platter etched with the apricot cookie recipe written by my siblings and me. And now, we are offering beautiful prints that can be framed and pulled out for all of those yearly traditions. 

We hope this collection of recipes and prints can help inspire rhythms and traditions for you and your family for years to come!