I don’t know how to even start an entry like this. This is Liam, 6, who died on Monday. I never met him. I met his mother, the unstoppable Gretchen Holt Witt, when I worked at Real Simple. She worked at Oxo (she still does) and our paths crossed on a bunch of stories there and a few years later at Cookie. When Liam was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma in 2007, she decided to hold a gigantic bake sale to raise money for pediatric cancer research. And by gigantic I mean gigantic: 96,000 cookies, $400,000. Four hundred thousand dollars! And that was only the beginning — that bake sale turned into the astounding Cookies for Kids Cancer [1] organization, which helps parents organize bake sales around the country so we can all do our part to help children like Prince Liam the Brave, as he came to be known. The goal is to hit 10 million dollars this year in his honor. Please, if you have a moment, take a second to donate, or, better yet, organize a bake sale in your neighborhood in Liam’s name.
Local friends: If you have any baking skills (or even if you don’t) and would like to get involved in my bake sale (April 9 at the Farmer’s Market) please get in touch [2]. Non-local friends, if you have a go-to bake sale item that you know for a fact will sell like crazy, please enlighten.
Thank you all for listening.