One of my favorite family traditions has always been our Christmas Eve cookie delivery.

It started with my grandparents, who would walk through their neighborhood in Brookline, MA visiting their friends on Christmas eve - my grandmother with cookies for the ladies and my grandfather with bottles of liquor for the men. True story. This is the stuff family legends are made of.

Fast forward a decade or so, and my mother decided we should pick the tradition back up - just without the booze. We made a list of family friends - those people who had meant a lot to us over the past year - and baked a whole bunch of cookies for them. We then charted our route and drove around on Christmas Eve delivering our gifts. And I loved every minute of it, every year. It was a time to connect with my mom, a time to bring holiday cheer to others, and a time to give back to our friends without expecting anything in return.

Eventually, I took the tradition over completely, and I’ve continued it as I’ve had my own kids. And while baking with little ones isn’t as fun or joyous as it seems, it’s important to me to share this experience with my kids as my mother did with me. It has become the one point of the year when I know we will see friends we don’t get to connect with often, those friends who are still important to us even though the craziness of life keeps us apart over the rest of the year. It is still a time when we can thank our friends for being just that - our friends.

This year, everything is different. But this tradition is more important to me than ever. So, while I am 100% sure no one will want to eat cookies baked in someone else’s kitchen in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, I wanted to find a way to make our tradition work even in 2020.

Enter: the Once A Year Baker blog. I’m certain no one anywhere would think it’s a good idea to start a blog that you only intend to update once a year with no promotion and no intention of even a minor focus on SEO - but it seems like a good idea to me! It’s a way for me to share my holiday tradition with my friends - to be “socially distant” while still maintaining connection.

I hope to be able to return to my normal holiday tradition next year and incorporate this site into it, rather than having this site be the tradition itself. But, for now, I will put all of the love I typically put toward making a ton and a half of cookies into making just one batch of 12 cookies and posting them on this site - like my very own 12 Days of Christmas. And maybe, just maybe, I can bring my holiday cheer to more friends this year than ever before.