The Minnesota Farm Woman

Years ago, every town had a bakery or two, and every bakery had a baker or two. If you went to your favorite bakery for a dozen cookies or rolls or doughnuts, you got 13 instead of 12. Since my mom was a fantastic cook, we rarely got “store-bought” goodies in our family. I do remember stopping once with her while on vacation for a white paper bag of cookies and was fascinated by the fact that a dozen cookies was really not a dozen cookies. Or maybe I was just fascinated by the bag of cookies. Mom, as most moms tend to do, turned it into a math lesson. Elementary math is much easier when learned with cookies rather than calculators. Although I would much rather think of a kindly baker dusting the flour off his apron to hand out an extra sweet treat as the origin of the baker’s dozen, it was really started as a preventative measure to keep the baker from having his fingers or ears chopped off for cheating his customers in those wonderful days of yore. Since a dozen bread rolls should have equalled a pound of bread, the baker threw in an extra one to make sure his customer got what he was paying for and the baker could go home with all of his body parts intact. It got me thinking that in many ways, we are like those cheating bakers. In our busy world, we cheat ourselves and others of what’s really important trying to make time for the things that in the grand scheme of things, don’t make a bit of difference at all. What if we all chose to give that little bit of extra, our own baker’s dozen of sorts, in our everyday lives? What would happen if we gave an extra dollar to our church, local school, or favorite charity? What if we shut down our computers, put down our remotes, and volunteered for one extra hour each week? What if we took our first negative thought of the day and turned it into a positive one? What if we give our family an extra hug or an “I love you” before we go to bed tonight? There are roughly 316 million people in our country today. That’s 316 million dollars, hours, and positive thoughts just for today. Don’t think I’m forgetting about those bedtime hugs. 316 million sweet dreams tonight is bound to make the world a better place tomorrow. Those dreams would be sweeter than a dozen cookies any day, even if it is a baker’s dozen.