Christmas cookies a 4-generation family tradition
If you're going to bake 670 or so Christmas cookies, it will cost you $250 at Costco for 45 cups of flour and roughly 50 other ingredients: nutmeg, sugar, brown sugar, red sugar, green sugar, red hot cinnamon, almond extract and more.
[...] if you're the proudly Polish-American Augustyniewicz family of west Wichita, it also takes six Augustyniewiczs working all waking hours for two days, including two Augustyniewiczs flying in to carry on more than 70 years of tradition while wielding a certain 70-year-old set of cheap red plastic cookie cutters that four generations of the Augustyniewicz family have used since the 1940s, The Wichita Eagle (http://j.mp/2g8FjkC ) reports.
The cookies became such a family Christmas tradition as to be held almost sacred by the Augustyniewiczs, who have baked now for parts or all of eight decades.
By midday Friday, Cathy Augustyniewicz had set a baseline for productivity: "I already put in seven hours, making 12 batches of cookie dough," she said.
Elise had already started using family-sacred Augustyniewicz cookie cutter relics.
Olga baked the cookies for 40 years, first from Seattle, then from Tucson; she and Stanley Jr. decided to hand off the tradition and cookie cutters after last Christmas.