Mom's Christmas Cookies Tombstone

Cascade, Iowa

Maxine Menster loved to bake cookies. Her children recalled that at the end of each year Maxine's prodigious cookie production output would cover every flat surface in the house, including chairs, and that the Christmas tree would droop with cookies as ornaments.

So when Maxine died in 1994, her family decided that her best engraved epitaph would be her holiday cookie recipe.

"Mom's Christmas Cookies" recipe fills the entire back of the Menster family tombstone. Visitors may wonder if the cookie recipe was a Maxine Menster family secret, only to be revealed "over my dead body." But her kids insist that that's not true, that Maxine was a generous person, and that sharing her cookie recipe was simply the best way to remember her.