I have discovered a new endangered species. Judging by the difficulty I have had in locating even a single example of the species, sightings must have been decreasing for some time, but it is only in this year that the absence has suddenly become striking. I refer, of course, to the Hanukah cookie cutter. It is a creature that normally comes in a variety of shapes, of which the Star of David, menorah and dreidel have always been most common. This year, I have been able to locate only the Star, and that generally with great difficulty, as it seems to have mated with the five-pointed star to which it is closely akin and to have failed to breed true in most instances.
At first I thought that perhaps my inability to locate Hanukah cookie cutters was due to the region in which I was looking. Northwest Indiana is not generally known for its large Jewish population, and so the things that would be of most interest there don’t get sold. So I went hunting in Indianapolis on two separate weekends. The first one, my friend Li and I stalked the elusive creatures through multitudinous high-end stores at the upscale mall in Indianapolis. The next one, I went wandering about the neighborhood in which most of the Indy Jewish community resides, poking my nose into assorted shops that I know have hosted the cookie cutters in prior years. No luck. We didn’t even get a whiff of essence of Hanukah cookie cutter. It was both distressing and frustrating.
I’ve given up. I ordered a set through Amazon. The price was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but hey, there comes a point when one realizes that further frustration is also not worth it. My son wants to make cookie cutter cookies for the holiday. Since he so seldom wants to do something that requires that sort of coordination, we are doing it. That’s all there is to it. And I’ve been asked to bring cookies for the second grade Christmas party (no, they don’t even make a pretense of calling it a “winter holiday party” here, and no, I’m not making a fuss, but that’s another story), and I will be bringing cookies in the shapes of Star of David, dreidel and menorah. It’s my own gentle, personal political statement. “We are here too”, they will say, to the parents far more than the children. “And by extension, so are others who aren’t exactly like you.” But I hadn’t expected to have a problem doing that because the requisite cookie cutters had, all unnoticed, become an endangered species.