Feeding the force with 1,200 cookies, 25 pounds of fudge

This holiday season, Carol Ren will make about 100 dozen cookies and 15 to 25 pounds of fudge. Then she’ll give it all away.

Ren and her mother, Betty Ott, have been baking for decades every holiday season. They give all the cookies and confections they make to the Montana Highway Patrol, the Columbia Falls Police Department, the Montana Veterans Home, family and friends and most of the neighborhood at the trailer park they live in off U.S. 2 in Columbia Falls.

Ren said she learned baking from her mother and her home economics teacher in high school, Agnes Cady.

She makes a list of the cookies she wants to bake and then gets to work. It usually takes three or four days straight to bake them all, but this year it has taken longer.

They’ve had to care for her father, Floyd Ott, after he suffered a stroke and moved into the Montana Veterans Home. Betty and Floyd have been married for 67 years. Still, they get by.

“We don’t have a lot, but we share what we have,” Betty said during a visit to their kitchen last week. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

Carol said her favorite cookies to make are Scandinavian Rosettes, but they’re time-consuming. The dough has to be prepared, then chilled, then deep-fried in lard. The end result is a crispy light cookie that melts in your mouth.

Carol has a special attachment to the Highway Patrol. Her son, Jerry, is a patrolman, and her late husband, Mike, was a highway patrolman who was killed in the line of duty in Eureka in 1978.