Preparation for the annual Cookie Walk at St. Peter the Fisherman Church in Mountain Home rivals the efficiency of Santa’s workshop.
A few days to a week before the first Saturday of December, about 20 to 30 volunteers mix, roll and shape cookie dough. Giant pans lined with cookies are placed in the convection ovens at the parish’s Family Life Center and once baked, they are frosted and sprinkled. These parish baking days are in addition to the individuals making and freezing sweet desserts months before the big day.
The result is thousands of baked goods, ready for a line of customers to buy the homemade treats. The fundraiser raises about $4,400 annually for the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society.
But nostalgia is the secret ingredient to the fundraiser’s success over the past 20 years.
“Off the top of my head, it’s a social thing. People don’t bake anymore. They truly don’t. These are homemade — your grandmother’s recipes, your mom’s recipes,” said Jennie Rowland, St. Peter’s parishioner and Cookie Walk chair and co-founder. “People come for the cookies. Everybody doesn’t have grandkids. They used to bake with their kids, making all the cut-out sprinkle cookies, and they’re not going to do it for just themselves. The volunteers love to come bake it at church, and others love to come and buy them.”
The inaugural Cookie Walk began in 2004 to raise money for the parish’s Family Life Center, built in 2005. Parishioner Theresa Boekholder was one of the Cookie Walk founders and continues to volunteer, donating all the ingredients for the cookies made at the parish. Individual bakers donate their ingredients.
“We were in the middle of building our Family Life Center, and I had participated in a cookie walk in Illinois, where we moved from,” Burkholder said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, we could do this here.’ So I put a notice in the bulletin ‘cookie walk meeting,’ and that’s what started it all.”
Once the center was funded, the Cookie Walk started raising money for the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society, founded in 2005.
Phil Zimmermann, the society’s president and a founding member, said they help people in the surrounding counties with basic needs, including a food pantry and money for rent, utilities, prescriptions and gas for out-of-town medical appointments.
“We will go all out to help the people that come to us,” Zimmermann said, adding that she and many society volunteers also help with the Cookie Walk. “It’s probably our most important fundraiser of the year. We exist on donations from St. Peter’s parishioners.”
The Cookie Walk, falling this year on Saturday, Dec. 7, is held in the Family Life Center from 8 a.m. to noon, with most items bought up by 10:30 a.m., Rowland said. Hundreds of people attend from St. Peter’s, the community and other nearby Catholic parishes, like St. Andrew Church in Yellville. In addition to what’s for sale, broken cookies are put out for people to snack on and visit with one another.
“It’s an all-parish event … this is everybody. They’re very generous,” Rowland said.
It has continued every December, despite the occasional blizzard or even the global COVID-19 pandemic, where safety measures like masking and checking temperatures were followed. After the pandemic, volunteers began wrapping most platters of the sweet assortments to weigh, price and place on the 38 round tables in the center.
The heart of the Cookie Walk will always be the volunteers, who dedicate several hours baking sweet breads, kolache pastries, candies, brownies and cookies of every variety. Some even enlist relatives who visit from out of state or non-Catholic friends to chip in.
“We’ll welcome anybody to come with us and that’s happened a lot over the years. There’s a lot of chit-chat going on and everyone brings their own lunch and we eat together,” Boekholder said. “You forget all your troubles when you go there.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s all fun and frosting.
“It’s grueling. You’re on your feet when you’re baking; you’re standing. We have the banquet tables on risers, waist high when we’re standing up to roll the dough,” Rowland said of baking days at the parish, which last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. leading up to the Cookie Walk.
About 1,000 kolaches are made yearly and go quick, along with almost that many rum balls.
“I make biscotti, all kinds of it. Last year, I think I made 20 different kinds,” Boekholder said. “There’s always chocolate. There’s a Christmas one that has red and green cherries in it and dried pineapple and nuts. Then there’s anise, that’s a good one … I collected about 100 recipes over the years.”
As volunteers reflect on 20 years of success, Rowland said the event will continue because it’s a great opportunity for parishioners to get to know each other and raise money for a good cause.
“It’s the fellowship. Oh, we have so much fun. We get to know each other. The ministry is just to get our parish to know each other,” Rowland said. “Our church is so big. You might be coming for five years and not know anybody. But for this event, we say, ‘Come and bake with us.’ People just show up, and if they like it, they come back.”
