News
It's all about cookie jars
Scott Wagar
12/11/2012
“People have got to learn: if they don’t have cookies in the cookie jar, they can’t eat cookies.”
These are the words of Suze Orman and no where at the present moment can the history and creative art of cookie jars be found than at the Bottineau Tech Center.
With the kick-off of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit, Key Ingredients: America by Food, in Bottineau over the weekend, the local Key Ingredient Committee has prepared a number of local exhibits. Starting with an apron exhibit, the next display is the cookie jars exhibit.
The collection of cookie jars comes from Twilla Glinz, who donated this collected work of jars to the Bottineau County Museum, which in turn granted the pieces to the Smithsonian exhibit.
The collection is a spectrum of colorful and creative cookie jars.
Origins of cookie jars started in England in the latter part of the 18th century. They were called biscuit barrels or jars and were often glass jars with metal lids.
In America, cookie jars became popular in 1929 at the start of the Great Depression. These jars were also made of glass with metal screw-on lids. By the 1930s, stoneware started to replace glass cookie jars and prevailed with cylindrical shapes and was painted with flowers or leaves, or had vibrant, colored decals on them.
Ceramic eventually replaced stoneware and the Brush Pottery Company in Zanesville, Ohio, became the first company to produce cookie jars in mass production. At the same time, pottery companies which designed cookie jars began leaving the cylindrical shape and started creating the jars in the shapes of figures, animals, fruit, vegetables caricatures and companies such as Coca-Cola, Campbells and Kellogg’s.
The Golden Age of cookie jars happened from 1940 to 1970 when numerous companies produced cookie jars. Perhaps one of the greatest collectors of cookie jars was artist Andy Warhol who collected 175 ceramic cookie jars and brought back an interest in others to collect the jars. In 1980 Warhol’s collection was auctioned off at $250,000 even though he collected the majority of the jars in flee markets for little or no money.
Over the years, cookie jars have brought on cultural idioms like, “keep your hands out of the cookie jar,” “I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar,” “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?” and the financial term, “cookie jar accounting,” which symbolizes the custom of increasing reserves in good financial years but “eating them up” in poor economic times.
Tim Davis, a member of the Key Ingredient committee in Bottineau, stated that the cookie jar exhibit was chosen because the jars play an important part in America’s history with food.
“The cookie jars represents an aspect of food,” Davis said. “I know when I was a kid, we always headed for that cookie jar, that cookie jar is where things happened. And, everybody loves cookies and cookie jars because they have a good feel. It’s a good comfort food. Besides that, they are colorful and attractive.”
The cookie jar exhibit was supposed to close on Monday, but it has been decided to continue the display for an extended period of time inside the Tech Center in downtown Bottineau. Hours for the exhibit are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m.