Dear Friends—both old and new,
At noon on Sunday, June 9, 2024, my family gathered at our homeplace in Clemmons, NC. We posed together for photographs, shared a simple meal, and scattered my grandmother’s ashes in her flower garden, as was her request. Present for the ceremony were her husband, her four children and their spouses, her seven grandchildren and their spouses, and her four great-grandchildren.
Present, too, was the homeplace. Since 1842, when Jonathan Fischel, my great-great-great-grandfather, hewed its first timbers, the house has watched as family members were born and raised, married and labored, aged and passed on. Now Grandma—Evva—Mrs. Hanes—having been born in this home, having been raised in this home, having rebuilt this home from the ground up in 1983, having hosted dozens of family reunions, class reunions, church group meetings, birthday parties, showers, weddings, and thousands of meals and hundreds of guests in this home, and having passed away in this home—she has newly become a part of it in a very old way. Her presence persists in this homeplace, in her enduring legacy, and in the family she nurtured.
Family Update
On November 30th, 2023, Lori and I welcomed our second child, Lydia Josephine Hanes Templin, into the world—and into the family business. When I was growing up, we had a joke in our family that, during the busy season (roughly mid-November until Christmas), all emergencies were to be rescheduled for after the New Year. If it wasn’t about Moravian Cookies, “Put ‘em on hold, put ‘em on the shelf, or put ‘em on ice.”
Wisely, no one suggested to Lori that she should try to delay the arrival of Mrs. Hanes’ fourth great-grandchild. Perhaps, as the Hanes family grows in numbers, we also grow in grace and understanding. More likely, though, it’s because we have such a fantastic team of employees, family, and friends at Mrs. Hanes’ Moravian Cookies that the effect of our untimely absence was ultimately minimal. To those employees, family, and friends, Lori and I express our gratitude.
Lori and I also wish to thank the doctors and nurses at The Birth Center at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and in the Brenner Children's Hospital NICU, where Lydia had to spend her first five days. Lori and Lydia's care was as professional as it was compassionate.
Bitty Liddy is the happiest baby I’ve ever seen, with a quick, cheerful smile and round chubby cheeks that squeeze closed her eyes when she giggles.
Mine and Lori’s oldest child, Adelaide, will be three in October. She fashions her big sister role out of equal parts gentle fondness and rigid authority, which, as a fellow oldest child, I can say sounds about right. Throughout the day, she effortlessly alternates between coos of “I love you, sissy” and cries of “I’m the leader!”
This year, Adelaide completed her first season of dance classes at the same studio where her cousins Lucy Jean and Evva Kate are also students. She also tried rolling and cutting cookies for the first time. She was a natural, of course.
Both our girls will grow up in the business as I did, learning each job and filling in when needed. The best advice I can offer them at this stage is to hold onto the “Cookie Tester” title for as long as you can. Oh, and get a catchphrase. Mine is, “You make the best cookies in the world, grandma!”
My nephew and niece, Hanes and Georgia, three and one, respectively, are growing up so fast. Hanes is playing T-ball this year and dreaming of being in the big leagues. Little Georgia has her mother’s sweetness, independent streak, and ferocity. Come to think of it, she reminds me quite a bit of my little sister. She even thinks the world of her big brother, just like Madison.
Mona, the bakery President Emeritus—and my mom—has fallen in love with being a grandmother of four under four years old. Or at least I hope she has, because she sure spends a lot of time with them. If you’ve read Mrs. Hanes’ memoir What More Could I Ask For? my story, you might have noticed that the second half of the book contains many repeated references to Madison and me staying with Grandma and Grandpa. She even remarks on it herself on page 138, writing, “I was keeping Jed and looking back on my diary, I can’t believe how much I kept him.” Well, Mom doesn’t quite believe it either, but she has been inspired now to include detailed records of all the times that she looks after her grandchildren in her diary. So, in twenty years, be sure to order a copy of Ramona Hanes Templin’s memoir, tentatively titled Hotel Grandma’s House: An Audit. She’s joking, I think.
This year, thanks to Lori’s careful pruning and thinning, she harvested over thirty pounds of peaches from the young tree at our home. She turned that into several peach cobblers (page 260 of Grandma’s cookbook Supper’s at Six and We’re Not Waiting: Second Seating) and three gallons of homemade peach ice cream (page 321). Homemade peach ice cream was Grandma’s favorite treat and a beloved family tradition; she was always sure to make a gallon for the fourth of July. Everyone was pleased to see such a delicious tradition live on.
Regarding traditions, our family still gets together for meals about every week, mainly at Mona and Scott’s. However, Madison and Jim have hosted the big Thanksgiving dinner for the last two years. Around the Boland’s Thanksgiving table, the Hanes family, their in-laws, and friends share simple food and “make memories that last forever,” as grandma would say.
Re-creation, Renewal, and Preservation
Mrs. Hanes’ Moravian Cookies is still family-owned and operated. My wife Lori and I handle the day-to-day business. My aunt Caroline (Grandma’s youngest) and her husband Norian answer phones and assist customers most Saturdays. Their oldest, Evva Kate (named after Grandma), just got her worker’s permit and will spend her Saturdays and Christmas breaks helping around the bakery. Her two siblings, Lucy Jean and Norian Travis, are sales staff in training. My Mom still handles most of the public relations and commercials, and my uncle, Mike, the bakery Vice President Emeritus, still packs packages during the Christmas rush.
Grandpa Travis Hanes is doing well. He stays busy maintaining the fields and trails around the homeplace and whittling walking sticks out of saplings that Mike brings him. Grandpa’s made over four hundred walking sticks so far this year, which is pretty impressive for a 92-year-old. Likewise, Mike spends much of his free time (when he’s not hunting for arrowheads) making beautiful hand-thrown pottery. Both Mike’s pottery and Grandpa’s walking sticks are available for sale at our bakery, but—before you ask—they are unavailable for mail order and one of many reasons to visit us in person at our bakery in Clemmons, NC.
Another reason to visit us is to see some of our recent changes. Now, Moravians aren’t exactly known for making a habit of changing things. The Moravian response to the old “How many (Moravians) does it take to change a light bulb?” is “Change! What’s wrong with the old one?” If you stop by our bakery any weekday before 2:30 in the afternoon, you’ll see us rolling and cutting cookies by hand the same way my grandmother and great-grandmother made them, and you’ll smell the aroma of the same ginger cookie recipe that has wafted out from the ovens and cookstoves of Moravians at Christmastime for hundreds of years. That’s tradition, and that’s unchanged.
We also have many of the same employees we’ve had for years. If you’ve ever placed an order over the phone, you probably spoke with Deborah, our Office Manager, who has taken excellent care of our customers for the past twenty-five years. If you instead walked into our store or took a tour of the bakery, I'm sure that Holly, our Retail Manager for eight years, made you feel right at home. During your visit to Mrs. Hanes, I hope you took a moment to watch our Artists in Aprons at work and admire the speed and delicacy of their craft. Tammy, our Rolling Team Lead, and Patricia have both been rolling and cutting cookies in our bakery for thirty-five years—since 1989. I have known them almost my entire life. Rita, our most experienced Baker, has been with us for over twenty-seven years, and we will celebrate her well-earned retirement this Fall. One of our seasonal employees, Ruth, didn’t start working for us until after she retired, but she has been skillfully packing our red tins with perfect stacks of cookies since 1995. She is 96 years old.
But as I said, we have made some changes recently. After all, four generations of our family have been making cookies in this exact location for over a hundred years, parts of our current building are over fifty years old, and some of our equipment was nearly antique even before we started using it.
Our most significant update this year was replacing our roof after a once-in-a-hundred-year hailstorm. As you can imagine, replacing the roof on a 34,000-square-foot metal building requires some planning, but as of this writing, it is nearly complete and ready to shelter our bakery for another fifty years.
We also replaced our eighty-year-old mixer, which finally wore out beyond repair. Our new mixer is, true to fashion, a newly rebuilt forty-year-old mixer, but it runs like a dream and makes superb dough. We even got to choose the color: bright red, like our tins.
Replaced, too, were a dishwasher, refrigerator, washer, dryer, and five A/C units.
Over the years, I’ve learned firsthand that preserving a long-running business requires replacing much of what made it successful. Equipment breaks or becomes obsolete, suppliers reorganize or discontinue, circumstances change, and people retire or are called away.
In short, things fall apart, and it takes time, effort, and a commitment to the future to replace that which needs replacing. After a while, like the Ship of Theseus, you find that not one plank is original—all have been replaced. Is it a new ship? Is it a new company?
I think a long-running family business must be like a tradition, where it is preserved through renewal and renewed through re-creation, which is a type of replacement. Traditions we fail to renew become just memories, and there’s nothing wrong with memories. But my daughter Lydia never got to try Grandma’s homemade peach ice cream on the fourth of July. That memory is mine. To preserve the tradition, I must replace Grandma’s homemade peach ice cream with my own and re-create the tradition for my daughter. The original tradition is thereby renewed, and its preservation, rooted in a distant past, extends far to her future.
Likewise, this process of renewal and re-creation preserves our family business. It is the same bakery, the same cookie, the same tradition—even if all the planks have been replaced.
I’m grateful and awed that Mrs. Hanes’ Moravian Cookies is a part of so many of your traditions. I hope you continue to renew them year after year, recreate them for the next generation, and preserve the original taste of tradition far into the future.
Sincerely,
Jedidiah Hanes Templin
President, Mrs. Hanes’ Moravian Cookies
9/1/2024
“You make the best cookies in the world, Grandma.”