One weekday morning, the 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds at the church nursery school smell baking cookies and plead with their teacher to give them a kitchen tour. So she asks veteran baker Vicki Roland, who can hardly refuse: Forty years ago, Vicki was one of those nursery school children enchanted by the scent of butter cookies wafting along the hall. She ends the tour with a demonstration at one of the decorating tables, where each child picks up a cookie before going back to class.

Though Cookie Bake is much more relaxed than it was when a handful of stern women ruled the church kitchen, there are still a few basic rules. Dough must be rolled as thinly as possible, resulting in crisp, golden, almost gossamer cookies. (The night before baking begins in earnest, long tables in the library are raised to counter height on cement blocks and then covered with thin canvas to keep the rolled dough from sticking.) The most experienced rollers are given the more temperamental nut-laden walnut-spice dough, which can stick and crumble if overworked or too warm. Only those with a watchful eye and short stature—taller people being prone to backache—are allowed to monitor the oven. Thus qualified, Marilou Stewart has been oven keeper for the last 20 years. (There's talk every year of bringing in a second oven for the week, but the church's old Garland always ends up doing full-time duty.)

After six days of practically nonstop baking, the tally begins to mount. Each day's production is carefully noted and stored away. Properly packing the cookies is just as important as rolling, decorating, and baking them. Large tins, some dating back to the first Cookie Bake over fifty years ago, are pulled from the church attic. The cookies are carefully arranged by type in the tins between sheets of waxed paper, insuring as little breakage as possible. Once filled with cookies, the tins are stacked in a cool, secure place (atop a shelf in the church library) until "cookie boxing" time on the Thursday before the sale.

Early in the morning on the first Thursday in December, two days before the Christmas bazaar, an eager group of us gathers to box the cookies. Everyone finds a station: bakery box assembly, ribbon cutting, opening up the tins, and organizing the cookies. We now have a rough count of each cookie variety, and a number is scrawled on a scrap of paper beside each tin to tell the packers exactly how many of each type should be included in every box. Then, like children playing musical chairs, we move round and round the table, each of us with a bakery box, picking up the designated number of cookies—pecan squares, stars, snowmen, scotties, santas—tin by tin. The game continues until all the cookies are gone. Filled boxes are passed to ribbon tiers, beribboned boxes are stacked onto a rolling cart, and the cart is wheeled into the unheated church. There, the white boxes wait, quietly, like perfect children, until Saturday morning, when they're brought back into the library to be sold. Like Christmas Day itself, the actual cookie sale seems almost anticlimactic. Neighbors, friends, and people who've always gotten their Christmas cookies at the Trinity Church bazaar line up before the doors open, and wait to buy their two boxes. Less than an hour later, the last of the four hundred or so boxes has disappeared.

Those who work at Cookie Bake don't have to wait in line with the others, but we, too, are limited to just a couple of boxes apiece. My husband and I mail one of our boxes to our friends in France and one each to our parents. I put our cookies in the freezer until Christmas Eve. Then we defrost and eat them. And with each bite, we taste the sweet flavor of shared community.