Charles Marohn on inflation as measured by the Christmas Cookie Index

In 2019 I created a basket of goods from my annual baking list that I plan to track year-to-year. These are standard items my grandmothers would have used, so it is not like they are going to change in quality or quantity. There are no substitutions, weighting, or hedonic adjustments that apply (if you don’t know what that is, you should); just a standard basket of goods that gives an indication of how much more or less it costs to produce my Christmas cookies each year. I am not using sale prices, as my wife will attest. 

Now I have two years of data and, while that is not in any way definitive—we need some more years to identify a real trend—the Christmas Cookie Index has risen 4.3% in the last year. This is compared to the official inflation rate of 1.2%. 

Here’s the official basket of goods in the Christmas Cookie Index:

I’m not pretending the Christmas Cookie Index is some definitive form of inflation index that should be tracked and reported by the BLS, but I do think it may be instructive over time. We’ll see. Certainly, had I excluded vanilla extract from my list, the index would have been in deflation, but try baking this plate of cookies without vanilla. 

~ Charles Marohn, "The Christmas Cookie Inflation Index," LewRockwell.com, December 8, 2020