Cranberry-Coconut Oatmeal Cookies

For many Americans, baking is very much a part of the holiday season. Those from the Caribbean regions have their rum-infused black cake or Christmas cake. Those from northern European traditions have a range of cookies. For many African Americans, it's about pies or even a gargantuan bounty of baked goods. My family was the exception. None of us were real sweets eaters, and, with only three of us, it just didn't make sense to go all-out. Therefore, I don't crave the heavy desserts that are for many a part of the season. 

Rather, when I think of the Christmas holidays, I think of the oatmeal cookies that my mother and I would invariably make. Unlike the oatmeal cookies that are for sale in many places these days, these cookies were not chewy, but were thin, crisp and crunchy. Several years ago, I resurrected my mother's old Fannie Farmer cookbook and tried my hand at our holiday recipe.

The cookies were as remembered, but being me, I could not resist the temptation to play around with the recipe. I confess, I am an inveterate recipe fiddler and always am ringing in the changes even with my old favorites. I add a bit of this and a dash of that and come up with something that is different. And so, I went to work on the oatmeal cookies on a cool day this past fall while I was in my kitchen on Martha's Vineyard. 

I started with my basic recipe but found myself also adding coconut flakes. Then, as I was looking around, I saw some dried cranberries that I keep around for snacking and for throwing into salads. I minced them up and added them to the cookie dough. What the cookies lost in crispness from the addition of the cranberries they gained in taste with the chewy tang of the berries nicely counterpointing the crunch of the oats and coconut. For the holiday season, I'm going to bake all my variants of the cookies and have them on hand to share with friends. They'll be surprised to see me eating sweets, but hopefully they'll enjoy them as much as I do.