These cookie cutters were made by the Educational Products Company of Hope, New Jersey, and according to the folks at cookiecuttersearch.com, that company made 100,000,000 cookie cutters, starting in the late 1940s. My set is missing the wreath; you can see a full set in this eBay listing. The company still exists, in some form, under the name Cookie Craft, but it’s hard to see if they are still active.
My mother brought home a set of these in the late 1960s or early 70s. The cool thing about them was the interior detail: They made cookies with incised lines, but if you didn’t get the dough just right, it would stick to the cutters. And you always had to poke the center of the wreath out with the end of a fork. (The inside cover of the box has one of the best baking hints of all time: Use powdered sugar, rather than flour, to dust the rolling pin and board when rolling them out.)
Of course, there’s a story to go with these:
My mother grew up in a house with a coal-fired Aga Cooker in the kitchen. It looked a lot like this modern model, and it had a plate-warming compartment as well as couple of ovens for different temperatures. Growing up, we always had gas ovens, and my mother used to put dishes and pots in the oven to dry “by the heat of the pilot light.” She kept doing this even after the pilot light was long gone. So one year, after a cookie-baking session, someone washed the cookie cutters and put them in the oven to dry, and someone else turned on the oven without checking. The house filled with a terrible smell, and the cookie cutters were no more.
At least, that batch. Thanks to the prodigious production of the Educational Products Co., Mom found another box of them a year or so later, and we were back to making detailed Christmas cookies.