Gingerbread people and loaves of stollen from Holly B’s Bakery on Lopez are wonderful, local holiday gifts, but if you weren’t lucky enough to get to the bakery before it closed for the season, take heart! You can still bake your own.

I sat down with Holly Bower at her bakery late one afternoon last month and, surrounded by piles of sugar-dusted stollen and baskets of gingerbread people, we talked about the pleasures of making and giving home-baked treats for the holidays.

“The reason I do holiday baking,” Bower began, “is because I’ve done it since I was little. I did it with my mother. It feels like such a wonderful way to celebrate the holidays. Having the smell of baking, the taste of all those wonderful holiday spices, nutmeg and cardamom, lemon zest, molasses, just feels like the right thing to be doing this time of year.”

And sharing what you bake adds to the pleasure of the season: “making any kind of cookie, no matter how simple, and presenting a plate of them to someone, maybe even on a plate that they don’t have to return, maybe a plate made by a local potter makes a wonderful gift,” Bower said.

Cookies, breads, scones and other treats filled our conversation as we enjoyed the next hour imagining home-baked gifts for friends and family. Bower generously shares many of her recipes for bakery favorites in her cookbook, “With Love & Butter” (2001), now in its third printing and available at Islehaven Books and Chimera Gallery.

“I have loved doing gingerbread people for ornaments and houses. That’s a pretty easy recipe. With cookies you plan to use as tree ornaments, make a hole in the top for a ribbon before baking. And for houses it’s pretty easy to make a pattern out of paper and figure out your dimensions that way. The frosting recipe in our book is great for decorating and strong as mortar for houses.

“I think it’s fun to decorate gingerbread cookies with something personal for each person: if they are a photographer, put a camera around their neck or if they wear a hat, put a hat on their head. I used to make really big almost 12 inches high gingerbread cookies for my kids to stick out the top of the stockings.”

Recalling her own childhood, Bower added, “My mother, brother and I always made a gingerbread house for Christmas and at New Years we got to invite our little friends over to demolish it.

“The stollen is a pretty involved recipe but it is delicious and it mails very well and freezes well. It’s wonderful to make in advance and to heat up on Christmas morning. To have stollen on Christmas morning is my idea of a perfect Christmas.”

Another holiday recipe from her cookbook is Christmas Lebkuchen, a gingerbread bar cookie. “It was inspired by my mom. Relatives from Germany sent it to her each year. It was always a great event when that arrived from across the sea.” Bower’s recipe blends the holiday flavors of molasses, honey, orange, lemon, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, and, of course, butter.

Yeast breads and scones also make great gifts. “Sometimes I enjoy taking bread dough and making a round wreath shape, just a simple three-piece braid and sprinkling that poppy seeds.”

“Scones are also a wonderful holiday treat. We have a scone recipe in our cookbook and it is a mix you could make in advance. You could even package it up.” The person who receives it can just add buttermilk, sugar and fruit and make as few or many as they’d like. The mix does need to be refrigerated because the butter is already cut into it.

Granola is another welcome gift. “We have a good granola recipe in our book. One of my sons makes it in his home in Aspen, Colo. People just love it.”

As our time together drew to a close, Bower wrapped up our thoughts: “I think that wintertime is a wonderful time to be inside around a warm oven baking and thinking of your loved ones, packing things up to send, or trekking through the rain and the wind to neighbor’s houses to bring freshly baked things.”