Our October Cookies Making Me Happy

Earlier this week, one daughter baked the cut-out sugar cookies
and made orange frosting for us to decorate our pumpkin face cookies.

I bought this pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter from a Hallmark display in the grocery store in 1982. There's even a date on the back of the cutter that indicates it was made in 1982.

There's also a price on the back of the cutter. I paid 75 cents at that time. To give you an idea of what 75 cents could have bought in 1982, a first class US stamp was 20 cents, so I could have sent not quite 3 letters or cards for the cost of the cutter. A first class stamp is currently 60 cents, FYI. What else could I have bought for the cost of this cutter? About 2 pounds of apples, or a little more than a loaf of bread (59 cents on average), or about a dozen eggs.

I remember that fall season the year I bought this. I remember shopping in the local grocery store buying cuts of banana squash for 17 cents per pound. Banana squash are very large, and stores used to cut these large squash into 1 to 2 pound portions and wrap in plastic film to sell alongside the other produce. I haven't seen cuts of squash sold in a grocery store in a couple of decades. But this was something done back then and made for a very inexpensive vegetable. I also remember that generic canned products were relatively new then. The cans were labeled in plain white with bold black lettering, "green beans," "dog food," "luncheon loaf" (spam), and there was even "beer." I was on a tight budget, so I actually tried and regularly bought the generic green beans (not the beer, though). The manufacturers of generic canned goods saved costs on advertising and marketing and passed those savings on to consumers. Their quality was inconsistent. Sometimes the product was pretty close to name brand, sometimes it was rather poor. I often found twigs and blemished beans in the cans. But this I overlooked for the savings. 

The year I bought this cookie cutter I also bought my first, very own Jack o' lantern pumpkin as an adult. I carved the pumpkin on October 31, then cooked and pureed it on November 1 to use in a pumpkin sheet cake for a birthday party for a friend's one-year-old later that week.

Shaped cookie cutters are a great value for seasonal celebrations. The same cutter can be used to make special holiday cookies every year for many decades. My pumpkin cookie cutter has seen 40 autumns. At this point, that works out to under 2 cents per year to own and use this cutter. I have my mother's heart-shaped cookie cutter, which she bought in 1958. That's over 60 years ago. I use it every year to make her favorite Valentine cookies. Someday, I'll pass my pumpkin cutter on to one of my kids and they can make our family's October cookies and get that same happy feeling I get making these each fall.

Making Homespun Trick-or-Treat Bags

Just doing something fun and creative this month. 

We get a handful of trick-or-treaters each year, all neighborhood kids. Our neighborhood is not considered one of the desirable T or T neighborhoods, as the houses are far apart and driveways long. So, the ones who do come I know are neighbor children. I like to do something nice for each of them. This year, I made small bags to fill with candy and trinkets. Here's how they look so far. Once filled, I'll turn the top down and thread a yarn through holes and tie closed.

Here's how I made these.

the finished bag

I used some of the brown packing paper that came in
boxes of groceries I ordered during the pandemic.
I mentioned this paper last fall.

These are supposed to look homespun, so the wrinkles in the paper
 don't matter. I cut the paper into lengths suitable for a small bag.

I rubber-stamped the center of the paper.

After stamping, I used glue stick along one of the
ends that I would be sealing to form a bag.

I flipped the paper over and added glue to the corresponding "flap."
Glue stick adheres best when both surfaces are coated with glue.

I used a small box to serve as a form for making a bag. I taped a string
around the box, so I could slide the box out after glueing
the ends and bottom flap. I wrapped the paper around the box
and sealed the edges together.

After glueing the back, I glued the bottom flap,
as I would if I were wrapping a gift. 

I pressed the glued sections together well,
and creased the corners with my fingers.

Here's the bag flipped over.

While the box was still in the bag, I used pinking shears
to cut a zig-zagged edge along the top of the bag.

Now the box is ready to be pulled out of the bag.

I know this craft will probably not be up your alley. But I thought I'd share what I'm doing, as these bags are translatable to birthday party goodie bags and birthday and holiday gift bags. You can used lightweight brown paper sacks, gift wrap paper, white printing paper, newspaper, magazine pages, or any other paper, colored, printed, or plain. Just find a box to use as a form that is about the size of what you want to contain. Glue stick or tape works. You can add handles with ribbon, raffia, yarn, or cord.