A sweet holiday tradition

The showroom at Knoll furniture smells like cloves, chocolate, and molasses. On two long conference tables, employees are setting out boxes and bags of cookies: penny-sized gingersnaps, radiant iced snowflakes, fluffy white divinity candy, and long, crisp biscotti. Employee Rob Manziano is called to reception to pick up a package. It turns out to be six varieties of homemade fudge sent from his mother — and just in time. It’s Manziano’s contribution to the company’s annual Christmas cookie event.

Six years ago, instead of sending gift baskets to their co-workers in other cities, the Boston branch of this North Carolina-based office and residential furniture company started sending boxes of homemade cookies to Knoll employees in Toronto, New York, and Pennsylvania. ‘‘It’s so much more personal to do it this way,’’ says account manager Dina DiTommaso, whose chocolate-dipped coconut sticks are one of over a dozen varieties included in the boxes.

Beginning in November, sales assistant Farah Asmussen puts together the list of people who have helped the Boston sales team — with contracts, product management, and customer service — and solicits recipes from her co-workers. She leads the project and puts together a recipe booklet to accompany the cookies. Her contribution this year is toffee blondies, adapted from ‘‘The Joy of Cooking.’’ After making eight batches, she says, ‘‘I could probably make these in my sleep now.’’

Over the years, the Knoll cookies have gained a reputation among their recipients, and baking the sweets has become a tradition. Brad Dickinson has been making delicate, spicy ginger pennies every Christmas for 10 years. Alinka Amoroso’s tart lime sugar cookies reflect her effort to make ‘‘adult-oriented cookies that you could have with champagne, as opposed to a glass of milk,’’ she says.

Although he threatened to bring Fig Newtons this year, Bob Millard’s fragrant molasses cookies were a collaboration with his 13-year-old daughter Molly, who has helped him every year since the project began. DiTommaso’s children helped dip her coconut sticks in chocolate. For DiTommaso, who bakes seven or eight cookie varieties throughout December and freezes them until it’s time to eat them or give them away, Christmas baking is ‘‘a way to give the kids some longevity to their Christmas memories,’’ she says.

Other Knoll employees are less enthusiastic bakers. ‘‘I hate to cook,’’ says Linda Durant, looking critically at her macadamia-ginger biscotti. She’s concerned that they’ll hurt someone’s teeth. Jane Graham asked a friend who’s a professional baker to supply her with an enormous box of glistening iced sugar cookies in the shape of wreathes, reindeer, and ornaments. She loves to eat cookies, she says, but is ‘‘a better burner than a baker.’’