My mother, Cynthia Baker, made excellent chocolate chip cookies. I can still see myself, a very long time ago as a three-year-old, hoping for a taste as I sat on a tall red stool in the kitchen, watching her vigorously beat the butter, eggs, and sugar by hand.

Once a year, at Christmas, Mother made sugar cookies. Rather than drop cookies, that required rolling out the dough. Once it was just the right thickness, she placed her bright red and green plastic cookie cutters tightly together on it with the precision of a jigsaw puzzle pattern. I tried but never managed to do it quite to her standards.

As the years went by, she didn't make cookies very often, and by the time I had children, I was the proud owner of those colorful plastic trees, stars, bells, angels, and reindeer cookie cutters.

I confess to seldom using them, though I make that original chocolate chip cookie recipe with granddaughter Baker Grace a couple of times a month. Like her great-grandmother Cynthia, she’s become quite a cookie maker!

But Baker has had ideas of making something else. After all, she's been living above the soapmaking shop for nearly three years now, and it is not surprising she's been contemplating her own soap recipe. I believe it was nearly a year ago when she first mentioned it. She said she wanted to make pine soap; something that was like the evergreen trees in our woods. She wanted it to smell like those trees. She wanted to call it Christmas Tree Soap.

In preparation for making her imagined creation, several weeks ago we clipped and gathered evergreen needles which we infused in olive oil so that the goodness of those trees would be imparted into her soap. Then at last it was time to bring her idea to fruition! We strained the oil, combined it with other skin-healing ingredients like avocado, coconut, and castor oil, and cooked our soap until it was just right.

While it was cooking, she said she wanted her soap bars to look like Christmas trees, and I realized I had exactly what she needed to make the design: the green plastic Christmas tree cookie cutter that my mother had used throughout my childhood! It was perfect, as if it had been waiting for the day it would graduate from cookies to soap!

Christmas Tree Soap is not only luxurious in lather and feel, it is antiseptic, has excellent cleaning ability, as well as great skin-healing properties. And the aroma! It reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"!

In the Mind of a Child

I’ve just been outside…

With a Nudge Toward Fall