A Portly Passion

Pepper Edmiston lifts the toque-topped head of her chef cookie jar and--voila!--packets and packets of sugar substitute. A sign of the times if ever there was one.

“I don’t keep cookies in my cookie jars,” explained Edmiston, who has jars perched on bookshelves and in cabinets throughout her Pacific Palisades home. There are Santa Clauses and Little Red Riding Hoods, an alien, a cowboy and an Indian, monks and nuns, witches and angels, a sailor and a sheriff, a golfer and a Kabuki dancer.

And they are all obese. Her collection consists almost entirely of “fat, full-bodied people,” a quirk she attributes largely to sentimentality: A plump Granny cookie jar, now in her collection, once sat in her mother’s kitchen, always filled with cookies.

Granny, and Edmiston’s other portly pottery people, remind her of the warm, loving home in which she grew up--and which she has tried to re-create for her husband, Joe, and seven children. Plus, the jars are a bit of a hoot.

In 11 years--and “despite the protests of my husband and children”--she has amassed an eclectic mix of more than 200 jars, among them some from the ‘40s, some from Wal-Mart. No purist who goes only for the pristine, she holds up a cracked Humpty Dumpty.

“Who cares if Humpty Dumpty’s cracked?” she said. “He’s supposed to be.”

Why cookie jars? Edmiston offers a few reasons: Cookie jars “do not have fleas” and “are not fussy about what you put in their stomachs.” Besides, she added, “you can fall in and out of love with them--and they can’t do a thing about it.”

Some of those with which she’s fallen out of love will be for sale at an all-you-can-eat cookie feast the Edmistons will host Sunday in Pacific Palisades to introduce her book, “Cookie Jar ABC.”

Proceeds from the book signing, and from all book and jar sales, will benefit Happy Trails, founded by Edmiston in 1993 to offer dude ranch experiences to children with disabilities and catastrophic illnesses.

It is a cause close to her heart. Her son David, now 25, is severely retarded as a result of treatment for childhood leukemia. A decade earlier, she started Camp Good Times (now Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times), a summer camping program for cancer-stricken children.

She’s found that collecting cookie jars “helps get my mind off of David.” In September, she discovered the Internet, where every day thousands of cookie jars are offered for sale at sites such as EBay.

“I got carpal tunnel from clicking,” she said. “Then I started doing it with my left hand.”

She goes for jars she “can create a personality for” rather than stock cartoon character jars, although she made exceptions for Betty Boop and for Mickey and Minnie. On rare occasions she lets a thin character into her collection, ignoring her basic resentment of “someone who has a waist.”

She has spent as much as $350 for a jar but has learned to have a lighter hand with her mouse. Too many cookie jars in the house, she says, “could become oppressive.”

As a collector, she is one of thousands of devotees who search online and at collectibles shops for jars that capture their fancy. Some go for advertising jars, such as the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Campbell’s Soup Kid, some only for specific objects such as cars or houses, while others seek certain artists or makers.

The cookie jar is “a uniquely American thing,” Edmiston explained, dating from the Depression when “people couldn’t afford to go to bakeries, so they started making their own cookies” and needed airtight containers for storing them.

Today, most are manufactured in Asia. In 1988, Sotheby’s auctioned off Andy Warhol’s collection of 134 cookie jars for an astounding $240,350, and boom went the collectibles market.

“Cookie Jar ABC,” from Peaches Press, may be ordered online at https://www.cookiejarabc.com or from Edmiston at 15332 Antioch St., No. 171, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272. It is $35 ($25 of which is tax deductible). Information about the book-signing party is available at (310) 454-3388.

Beverly Beyette can be reached by e-mail at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.