By REBECCA WITTMAN

For The Beachcomber

Dear Heritage Museum Lady,

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no magic in cookies. Papa says, “If you see it in the Beachcomber, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Cookie Fairy?

Signed,

Virginia O’Handsinthecookiejar

Virginia, your little friends are wrong, and you can feel free to write them off as friends because they are nothing more than insects, mere ants in their intellect compared to the boundless measure of intelligence you’ve shown in posing such a courageous question. They have been affected by the skepticism of the television age, where reality shows aim to convince us that chefs are made of iron and overfed guys named Mario, with cynically bright-colored cookware and blatant disregard for hair nets, are capable of grasping culinary truth. But your little friends with their fraudulent gastronomic role models possess no more the whole of cookie truth and knowledge than they do the fundamentals of chipped beef on oven toast.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Cookie Fairy. She exists as certainly as love and generosity and the Land Trust exist, and she provides through good times and bad the poetry, romance and special calories necessary to survive life’s harshest realities, whether those realities come parading as television entertainment or printed in black and white on your daddy’s latest 401K statement.

Without the Cookie Fairy and at least a Snickerdoodle under your pillow, the external light that fills your room when the boogey man gets too close would be extinguished. You’d have to take out your old baby rattle and try to scare him away, but the joke would be on you because the boogey man knows the noise inside comes from Silver Dragees, and the sound will just remind him of all the beautiful Christmas treats the Cookie Fairy left for him as a child, little Gingerbread Girls decorated with edible silver buttons marching straight down the front of their little jumpers, and so he’d eat your rattle and then he’d eat you. All because you’d succumbed to the same pessimism as your little friends and forgotten the power of the Cookie Fairy and her death-defying raspberry almond thumbprints.

Cookies give to your life its highest beauty and joy. How dreary our lives would be without cookies — as dreary and pointless as if there were no ME. Not believe in the Cookie Fairy! You might as well not believe in Santa Claus.

You could get your papa to hire all the sheriff’s deputies and the entire fire department and Melinda Sontgerath herself to watch all the ovens on the Island to catch the Cookie Fairy at work, but even if they did not witness the all-powerful C.F. pulling her latest batch of oatmeal jumbles from someone’s dual fuel Viking, what would that prove? It would just tell you they had all fallen asleep on the job, probably tranquilized by a glass of warm milk and some lavender shortbread.

Your childlike faith is your greatest ally; don’t lose it. Harry Truman lost his, and look what happened to him. He spent his entire adult life demanding, “Show me!” Barack Obama believes in the Cookie Fairy, and he was able to change history!

The Cookie Fairy is supernal beauty and glory beyond, everywhere and nowhere at once. She takes many forms and gives us loving refuge in our sometimes-intolerable existence. She works seen and unseen, in the form of a grandmother one day, of a beloved neighbor another, your piano teacher the day after that. Sometimes she looks like your mom, other days she’s the spitting image of your babysitter.

Why, one time she looked exactly like my cousin Patti May, the same red hair and freckles from head to toe, whipping out something she called Aunt Kathryn’s Mystery Bars! The Cookie Fairy can hide in little boxes on Girl Scouts’ sale tables outside the Thriftway, or dance on the lawn behind the Blue Heron; you just never now where she’s going to show up. The veil covering her unseen world transforms at the drop of a toque to become an apron, and voila! Coconut macaroons and lemon squares!

And the magic she makes! By my word, there is nothing in all this world as real and abiding. Inside each little cookie, each and every one, she tucks a little memory, a nougat that tastes just like magic should taste — sweet and enchanted — and when you swallow that nougat, it takes up residence not in your tummy but in your heart. Every time you taste or even think about that cookie afterwards, the little nougat rises up out of your heart and carries you, like a heavenly windswept star, back across time to the first time you ate that cookie.

You’ll be able to smell the butter-perfumed air in your mother’s kitchen, where you did your homework after school with the help of a cold glass of milk and a warm chocolate chip cookie; you’ll once again be licking the Mixmaster beaters with your big brother, telling him it’s your turn to lick the bowl; you’ll find yourself standing in your grandmother’s country kitchen, her big table covered from one end to the other in a kaleidoscope of Christmas baking, so beautifully arranged and wrapped — her traditional gifts for everyone she loved.

You’ll be all grown up one day and your mom and your grandmother and your brother will all be far away, but the magic from those cookies will be there just waiting to spring to life with every bite, making it possible to be with them just like you are right now.

A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, the Cookie Fairy and the magic she tucks into all her creations will continue to make glad not just your heart, but the hearts of everyone you will ever love. It is something to believe in, the one part of childhood I promise you can keep forever.

— Rebecca Wittman is a freelance writer living on Vashon.

Heritage cookie expo

The Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Museum is hosting its first annual Heritage Cookie Expo from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 6 and 7.

Islanders will come together to share cookies, recipes and cookie histories. Bakers should provide 36 cookies for each recipe entered between 9 a.m. and noon Dec. 5,

and complete an entry form including its recipe and “cookie bio.”

Cookies will be sold, with samples of each entry for a “People’s Choice” award. For entry forms or more information, visit or call the Heritage Museum at 463-7808.