By Ikeda Christmas Cookie standards, these sugar cookies are the OG. And, my mother, Akiko Ikeda, was the OG of our family. My mother passed away peacefully on December 30th in Wisconsin, after a long illness. The full obituary is here, and Dan Woog wrote a very nice reflection on her as part of a group of people who made notable contributions to our hometown.

For me, the Ikeda Christmas Cookies are a major dimension of my childhood connection to my mom. She taught me how to make these sugar cookies (and the Viennese crescents and rainbow wreaths, shown here), and every bit of my sense for how these cookies should be comes directly from her.

To begin with, the sugar cookies are rolled unbelievably thin. About a millimeter. Baked in a 400°F oven, they can turn from raw to burnt in seconds. They’re almost like baked potato chips, but made out of cookie dough. To facilitate the rolling (and re-rolling) without the dough becoming tough, my mom learned (from somewhere?) that the counter must be dusted not with flour, but with a mixture of flour and sugar.

Many of my cutters come from her collection, and she and I both have always loved little tiny cutters that can be used to get more cookies out of one rolling of dough.

In my family there is a silly (but true!) story of a little glass vial of silvery sugar balls that my mother kept in her cookie decorating box for our entire lives, but which we were never allowed to use. These miniature, shiny jawbreakers were deemed too hard on the teeth, so despite being very pretty, were never actually put on anything. If any innocent friends happened to join in for the decorating and reached for the vial, they’d be promptly set straight. But, there the silvery balls lived, tantalizingly, in the box alongside other decorations. For decades. And, out of sheer sentimentality, that very vial now sits in my own cookie decorating box.

My mother liked to give us gifts that were “themed”. Music notes and bunny rabbits for me. Sailboats, labrador retrievers, and dragonflies for Jennifer. Ladybugs and cats for Louise. You can see these themes in the variety of cutters that I have now.

My mother would spend many hours making hundreds of cookies, candies, and fruitcakes every December, and she would assemble saran-wrapped paper plates laden with assortments, then send us around the neighborhood delivering them to family friends.

My mom was generous, loving, dedicated to working hard for others, and exquisitely exacting. She wouldn’t come out and tell me that I was doing something wrong, but she might instead take over a task from me if I wasn’t quite doing it right. It gave me pride when I became skilled enough to be able to share in more and more of the steps myself. Eventually, as her eyesight, dexterity, and energy declined, I took on the mantle for the cookie production in the family. As my first blog post explains, I’ve had to take years-long pauses from them, but every time I come back to making these cookies, I’m immediately at my mother’s elbow again, endeavoring to make cookies that would be mom-approved.

If you know me at all, you’ll recognize that striving for “mom-approved” isn’t limited to Christmas Cookies.