52 Weeks of Cookies

The recipes and techniques that one mother used to turn a year of her son’s military service in Iraq into a year of care packages brimming with cookies.

Single mother Maggie McCreath couldn’t decide which was worse: the fact that her only son (not yet twenty-one) was off to war in Iraq for the second time or the fact that they had only five days to prepare. Even more frightening, she knew that he would be part of the Surge and, as a paratrooper in the 82nd Division of the Army, the tip of the Spear. What she did not know—what she couldn’t even bear to consider—was how this deployment would end, both for her son and for his brothers in arms, whom she had come to know and love as her own. So she turned to the one pastime that had always brought her solace: baking.

Filled with delicious, original cookie recipes, 52 Weeks of Cookies recounts a mom’s unique methods of coping during her son’s deployment. With plenty of sugar cookies but no sugarcoating, 52 Weeks of Cookies is an honest, uplifting story of family love during a crisis, with all the fear, grief, laughter, gratitude, and joy that come with it. 

“When her 20-year-old son was deployed to Iraq with just a few days’ notice, Maggie McCreath desperately searched for her own mission to cope with the worry. She found it with the help of flour, sugar, vanilla and lots of love.” —Today