Annemarie DiMillo starts her Christmas baking in October and wouldn’t have it any other way.

She spends hours in her Portland kitchen baking cookies from recipes passed down through generations of her Italian family. She fills multiple freezers with 150 dozen cookies. Most were destined to be gifts or donated to the St. Pius X Christmas fair.

The baking connects her to family members who immigrated from Italy and the aunts who taught her to bake the recipes that originally came from her grandmother.

“It means the world to me to keep the traditions and pass them down, hopefully to my children and my grandchildren,” said DiMillo, 64. “It’s a good remembrance of my grandparents and great-grandparents.”

Many Mainers hold fast to their holiday food traditions, making the same recipes that have been passed down through generations of their families. It just doesn’t feel like the holidays without the whoopie pies, peanut butter balls and sugar cookies they enjoy every winter.

For many families, those treats connect them to their past and honor the family members whose recipes are scrawled on cards faded by time or long ago memorized.

“A lot of Yankee families honor traditions from generations gone by,” said Rachel Andrews Damon, 67, a Fryeburg resident, who is known in her family for the raised rolls they now eagerly await at every holiday gathering.

She calls them a “big fluffy receptacle for butter.”

“One year I forgot to make them and everybody was in a panic,” she said.

But nothing evokes Christmas quite like the apricot bread her mother, 86-year-old Marilyn Bennett, made for as long as Andrews Damon could remember.

Andrews Damon now bakes it every year. She said it fills her childhood home, where she lives, with “the smells from growing up.”

“It adds to the magical traditional memories,” she said.

SPECIAL CONNECTIONS

It has become a holiday tradition for Heather Carlow, of Scarborough, to recreate memories of making peanut butter balls and needhams, a classic Maine candy made with mashed potatoes. Carlow, 47, first learned to make the treats from her grandmother, but most years made them with her mother.

“It was our little special time together,” she said.

After her mother died in 2011, Carlow continued to make both recipes, always thinking of her mom. She now makes them with her 14-year-old daughter, Autumn, and gives them to friends and coworkers.

“It’s keeping the spirit alive and keeping my mom and grandma alive,” she said.

For Kim Pettingill, of Naples, making the ice box pie recipe handed down through several generations makes her feel connected to her mother, who died in 1987.

“It brings up feelings of family and holidays and times long passed,” said Pettingill, 62.

The recipe is “cheap, easy and quick,” Pettingill said. The pie — made with cream cheese, Jell-O, sugar and canned milk in a graham cracker crust — can be adjusted with different flavor profiles, but her family prefers lemon, which her mother always used.

Pettingill is thrilled that her granddaughter Jazmin, a sophomore at the University of Maine in Farmington, now makes it for her friends.

“When she wanted to make it, it was a very special feeling because it was passed down in my family for many generations,” she said.

HONORING THE PAST

For many Franco-American families in Maine, it wouldn’t be Christmas without tourtière.

Recipes for the savory tourtière, or pork pie, have been passed down through generations. For many, the smell of the meat seasoned with cinnamon, allspice and cloves simmering on the stove is as much a sign of the holiday season as Christmas trees and Santa Claus.

Families that moved from Quebec to find work in Maine brought with them the tradition of serving pork pie during réveillon, the feast that follows midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Though few still celebrate réveillon, pork pie remains a holiday favorite for many families and a link to their Franco-American heritage.

Emma Bouthillette, a lifelong Biddeford resident and author of a book about the city’s history, looks forward to the pork pies her mother bakes every year using a recipe handed down from her grandmother, Madeleine Croteau, who was 93 when she died in 2022.

“The thing I love about these recipes is that they are handwritten and stained with grease and food remnants,” she said. “The smell of the pork simmering with cinnamon and cloves is nostalgic. It reminds me of my mémère’s kitchen and the holidays.”

Bouthillette, 39, has taken over baking the recipe for whoopie pies handed down from her great-grandmother. The secret to a perfect whoopie pie, she said, is using marshmallow fluff in the filling.

DiMillo, the Portland woman known for her Italian cookies, said recipes she loves making the most were handed down through her father’s family. Her grandmother immigrated from a small town in the region of Italy where pizzelles — an anise-flavored pressed cookie — originated.

DiMillo’s grandmother died when DiMillo was very young, leaving her aunts, Theresa D’Alfonso Methot and Mary D’Alfonso McCartney, the matriarchs of the family. They were the ones who taught DiMillo how to bake their family recipes.

Every year, DiMillo makes the same treats: finger cookies, pizzelles, chocolate spice cookies and Italian filled cookies, a biscotti-like treat filled with a mixture of grape jam, chocolate chips, walnuts and maraschino cherries. Her favorite are wine cookies rolled in cinnamon sugar.

The holiday baking has become even sweeter for DiMillo now that she’s teaching her 5-year-old granddaughter how to carry on their family legacy.