Cookie Jar hits home (Spoilers)

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Christine62

Well-Known Member
Nov 7, 2013
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Oklahoma City
Cookie Jar is about memories--a recurrent theme in Mr. King's stories. Like, IT, Cookie Jar is about coping with the bitter and the sweet of childhood and adulthood. In IT, the bitter was monstrous: sibling death, abusive fathers and bullies from hell--the sweet was the bonds of friendship--the clown is a clever distraction to sell books.

Cookie Jar is a more reflective story about the happy memories--I imagine that Mr. King was missing his mother when he wrote this story. This story made me miss my mother very much. I cannot tell you how deeply moved I was by Cookie Jar. It so mirrored my childhood--except the memories.

My mother was also manic depressive and she also died when I was a child but I have no cookie jar of memories so aromatic and sweet to remember. The bottom of my cookie jar of childhood memories of my mother are dark and murky at best. Except a couple of broken pieces like the way we would rub noses for a kiss, and her setting my shy little box turtle named Penny in a saucer of water so it would peek out of her shell and say hello. This story made me ache for my mother. It made me sad for the lack of memories.

Not to get too literary, but Cookie Jar is about our mind and what we choose to focus on--we all have at the bottom of our Jar, our own charred bits of experience: Gobbits, Red Henrys and Black Johns. Things that are dark and horrible that make us shake in our veins when we remember.

My dark and horrible was constant fear and isolation even in a house of five siblings and two adults. One fear was the unknown. It was the 60's there was no knowledge of childhood trauma of loss and grieving. There was no storytelling of Mommy. She was a forbidden subject. In the absence of the good, she became something bad to me. And because I was of her, this bled into me--was I bad?

It's taken me 52 years to crawl out of my Cookie Jar of fear and realize I have the power to fill it with the sweetest memories of love, laughter and meaning. I purposefully create memories and give them away. I don't remember my mother holding me or her kiss, but I remember just yesterday giving such hugs and kisses to my grandboys (ages five and 8). I know they will remember Nanny making up songs, reading stories and creating a hundred different invisible friends each with their own personality.

Sometimes you have to be older to figure out you have control of your cookie jar. You don't have to hide it in the attic. You can bring it down, keep it close and fill it every day with memories of sweetness overflowing.