About a week before Christmas, I was wrapping one of the many presents I showered upon my wife in an attempt to offset my refusal to watch Hallmark movies with her, when I heard a knock at our front door. Nobody I know, or generally care to talk to, ever knocks on the front door, that’s what the back door is for.

The silly season has passed, so I didn’t suspect it to be a politician peddling promises, and it’s too cold out for the nice lads with the Latter-Day Saints to be out and about evangelizing in their white short-sleeve dress shirts.

Come to think of it, those nice lads still owe me a visit. A few years ago, they knocked on our front door and asked if they could educate me about their beliefs, but I had a dentist appointment to get to so I said, “Leave me your bible and I’ll study up for the next time you come around.” They awkwardly shifted around looking at each other for a few seconds, and then hesitantly handed over their bible.

Who could it be knocking on our front door at this hour (5:07PM)? The Christmas tree is hogging my vantage point in the front window where I generally lurk to peer out and determine whether to open the door or not. Throwing caution to the wind, I opened the door.

There stood a young boy, about 12-years-old, holding a plate of festively decorated homemade Christmas cookies in various quasi-discernable shapes. Festively decorated in the manner that a 12-year-old boy supplied with a big bowl of icing and a surplus of sprinkles would see fit. Not 4-H Burke County Fair blue-ribbon work…perhaps a participation trophy. So it goes.

We stood and looked at each other for a bit, me attempting to process what was going on, he shyly gathering himself to tell me. “I’m selling Christmas cookies to raise money to buy a snowboard…they’re kind of expensive.” I inquired as to the price of his creations, “$15 dollars for one plate or $25 for two.” he said, while motioning towards the second plate of cookies sitting on the steps behind him.

So as not to deny any of my neighbors a plate of cookies, and to maybe enable him to make five more bucks and experience the joy of enduring his chosen means of entrepreneurship for another cold call, I handed him $15. Knowing full well that I had no intentions of eating the cookies.

You ever watched kids make Christmas cookies with icing and sprinkles? They are an unsanitary lot, especially during cold season, and no matter where they have been or what they have touched, I’ve never known of a 12-year-old boy that willingly washed their hands. That, and the fact that his black hoody was festooned with the fluttery tell-tale signs of a family pet that he liked to pet.

Why would I buy cookies that I don’t intend to eat? For one, it’s Christmas. Secondly, to help a motivated young man achieve his goal, and thirdly, peace of mind.

How would I feel if a few days later I read a newspaper report about a kid, disgruntled with poor Christmas cookie sales, holding up a liquor store to buy a snowboard? “The perpetrator brandished what appeared to be a sugar cookie shaped as a handgun, or a misshapen reindeer (reports vary), and angrily demanded all the cash, a scratch-off lottery ticket, and a fistful of jerky. Investigators followed a trail of festive sprinkles to a local snowboard shop where the perpetrator was apprehended without incident.”

Lastly, I bought cookies I never intended to eat for insurance. A few years down the road, when that pleasant cookie peddling 12-year-old is an angstful teenager marauding the neighborhood with his gang of defrocked Cub Scouts and altar boys looking to slash tires and crack the skulls of garden gnomes, he might say, “Skip that house fellas, old man Ellis bought Christmas cookies from me once.”

May your New Year be shiny and bright with copious fistfuls of festive sprinkles.