Fill the Bowl Up

One kind of Christmas cheer offered by the Hanover Inn is cookies free cookies thousands of them. Since Bob Merrow became Inn manager five years ago, the trays and bowls of cookies under the

Christmas tree in the lobby have been a popular annual attraction. People walking in off the street are welcome to help themselves, not only to cookies, but also to apples and oranges. “The baker goes crazy,” Merrow said last month, “but happily so.”

We asked the baker, Bob Grosse, how many cookies he bakes. “We start about two weeks before Christmas,” he ex- plained, “and last year we went through about 20,000 cookies ginger cookies, sugar cookies, gingerbread men the usual Christmas assortment. We used nearly 300 pounds of flour, the same amount of sugar, and proportional amounts of the other ingredients. It’s just about a full-time job. I don’t mind it though, and the students in particular seem to like stopping in for an afternoon snack.”

Baker looked good by moonlight (when there was moonlight), but the lamps are on again