Christmas Cookie abundance yields help for local family

Christmas Cookie abundance yields help for local family
Cookie sale benefits Clarkson family

Baking Christmas cookies can be an enjoyable activity for the entire family. Every member can contribute to the process from measuring to mixing, baking to decorating, and munching to make them disappear. Most of us bake a few dozen cookies for ourselves and share them with our guests. Few of us would venture to bake 10 to 20 dozen cookies to give away. Nevertheless, about 50 volunteers baked dozens of cookies to help a local family.

Members of Saint John Lutheran Church in Hamlin organized a Christmas cookie sale to benefit the Baase family. Duane Rockow, chair of the Social Welfare Committee, explained. "Tom, his wife, Amy, and their children are members of Saint John Lutheran. The sale was a church effort to show our love and concern for him following his accident." Tom Baase of Clarkson suffered a traumatic brain injury in a motor vehicle accident this past September.

Pat Leverenz, Dian Bannister, Jean Leverenz and Anne Elphic planned the cookie sale. They placed a sign-up sheet on the church's bulletin board asking parishioners to bake cookies. "People made between 10 and 20 dozen cookies," Rockow said. "We had a couple of ladies that baked 25 dozen cookies." Bakers included members of the congregation, friends of the Baase family and some people who had no connection with the church or the family but had read about the sale in Suburban News and The Herald.

"We started out thinking internally," Rockow said. "We felt we'd be lucky if we could get a hundred people from our congregation to order cookies." To their surprise, they sold over 300 plates of cookies. And that presented a problem. "We wanted to get Christmas platters for the cookies," Rockow said. "We started out with 50 platters, and then 100 platters, and we still needed more," he said. "We ended up hitting most of the stores in western New York that could provide Christmas platters." One volunteer drove to Batavia to check the stores there.

Armed with platters and 500 dozen cookies, about 20 volunteers set to work. They filled 320 Christmas platters with 18 to 20 cookies each, wrapped them in cellophane and added a spiritual message and a word of thanks. People who had ordered cookies arrived at the church to collect their treats. "We never expected to have the response that we did," Rockow said. "It was rewarding to see the outpouring of love."

Additionally, Saint John Lutheran applied to the Thrivent Financial Lutheran Foundation for a grant. They responded positively," Rockow said. "The grant will match our cookie sale proceeds dollar-for-dollar." The church will donate all revenues from the sale, coupled with the grant funds, to the Baase family.

Baase spent six weeks in the brain injury rehabilitation unit at Saint Mary's Hospital. "Tom made huge progress while he was there," Amy said. Now he is continuing his recovery at home with his family. "We would like to thank our family and friends for the support they have given us throughout this ordeal," she said.