A Way With Caraway

[wasellajam]

December heralded the baking marathon, Why "the" instead of "a"? If it's a recurring thing, maybe a detail to suggest that? Could be as simply as rewording: December heralds the baking marathon
Alice knocked out a new cookie New cookie meaning a different kind of cookie, but batches of em, is my reading
every few days for two weeks, stacks
of tins piled high on every surface. This might be a dialect thing, and thus an irrelevant point since I'm just not in the know, but I'm left wanting to know, tin what? Tin cans don't seem right for cookies. 
I like the sound of “heralds” but can’t use it because I frequently get my tenses tangled up and am trying to be clearly in the past until the last lines. Yes, that’s what I meant by “new”. Where I am cookie tin are a thing, about 6 inched high and a foot across with removable lids. But these lines have multiple issues, if I keep them I’ll do something else there.

You can probably give yourself a bit of slack when handling the tenses, especially in this case. To me, the function of this line is to familiarize the reader with Alice's baking rituals, and then the rest follows in past tense. So really, you're still keeping the speaker in the past until those last lines. It could also possibly help to give us a detail to anchor us in this specific instance of Mawmaw baking cookies so we don't think it's just another instance of her seasonal baking.

I saw in other feedback that it was not clear how many people were in the poem, and I just wanted to say that I thought it maintained 2 characters (technically 1, excluding the speaker) throughout the poem. I stumbled a bit at "Alice", but I worked out that she is Mawmaw, just referred to by her given name.

Thank you, you’ve helped me see where I’m confusing my reader, makes perfect sense to me lol, may need to reshuffle or let go of something. Big help!!