When it comes to holiday food, there’s a certain comfort in keeping things familiar. We reach for the same dishes year after year, the ones that sat on grandma’s table or the desserts that kept family legends alive. Food is where holiday tradition feels most real, whether you’re gathered at a big family feast or enjoying something simple at home. Maybe this year, Lincoln’s Favorite Christmas Cookies can find their place on your holiday table.
That’s why it feels perfectly natural that a cookie loved in President Abraham Lincoln’s childhood is still passed around today. What may be less expected is how this modest, old-fashioned treat became part of his lore.
Lincoln’s Favorite Christmas Cookies
Among Lincoln’s favorite foods, gingerbread cookies stand out not for flavor but for the story behind them. Unlike his cherished vanilla almond cake or the dense corn dodgers he famously carried in his pockets, gingerbread men aren’t remembered because of a recipe. In fact, the recipe itself has been lost. What survives is a tale that reveals why these cookies mattered so much to him.
During one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln charmed the crowd with a simple story from his childhood in Indiana. Known for using humor to ease tension, he shared how gingerbread was a rare treat in his home. His mother once surprised him with three freshly baked gingerbread men, and he carried them outside to enjoy under a hickory tree. A neighbor boy, who had even less, asked Abe to share. Lincoln gave him one cookie, then the second, even though he longed to keep it. The boy devoured them and said, with disarming honesty, that no one loved gingerbread more than he did, yet no one got less of it.
The story, which was captured by biographer Carl Sandburg in “The Prairie Years” and later retold in “The Presidents’ Cookbook” by Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks, went like this:
“When we lived in Indiana,” the future president began, “once in a while my mother used to get some sorghum and ginger and make some gingerbread. It wasn’t often, and it was our biggest treat. One day I smelled gingerbread and came into the house to get my share while it was hot. My mother had baked me three gingerbread men. I took them out under a hickory tree to eat them.
There was a family near us, poorer than we were, and their boy came along as I sat down. ‘Abe,’ he said, ‘gimme a man?’ I gave him one. He crammed it into his mouth in two bites and looked at me while I was biting the legs off my first one. ‘Abe, gimme that other’n?’ I wanted it myself, but I gave it to him. ‘You seem to like gingerbread.’ ‘Abe,’ he said, ‘I don’t s’pose anybody on earth likes gingerbread better’n I do—and gets less’n I do.’”
The crowd loved the story. Newspapers soon picked it up, and the humble gingerbread man became tied to the image of Lincoln that so many admired: generous, grounded, and quietly funny.
Even though the story wasn’t tied to Christmas, it still carries the warmth of the season. It reminds us that gingerbread isn’t just a festive flavor. It’s a symbol of kindness, sharing, and simple joy.
We may not have Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s original gingerbread recipe, but we have our own versions to keep this piece of presidential nostalgia alive at the holiday table.
