No thanks, a sugar cookie of a candy cane with enough frosting send my eyeballs to the back of my skull will do just fine, thank you.
#5 of 31 Things I Love About Christmas: Making Christmas Cookies.
What other holiday has cookies so closely associated with it? Flag Day? Hardly so.
Cookies are a huge part of the Christmas memory bank and fabric of the holiday itself. No one leaves a few slices of pizza, wings and a Coke/brewski for Santa (though you wanna talk about extra presents...try it this year and see what happens). We leave cookies for Santa and milk or egg nog to wash it down. Though now I look back and wonder, I hope he got to our house soon after we laid out his treats, the last thing he needs is warm milk that has been sitting at room temperature for several hours. Icky.
I can remember as children, both at our house and occasionally Grandma's and Aunt Julie's houses, we would make Christmas cookies. Well let me clarify that. We would generally make a mess, cut out the sugar cookies, impatiently wait for them to bake, then happily frost, ice, sprinkle them with all the fixings. We were better off shooting the sugar directly into our veins. Mom, God Bless her, we would have plates upon plates of these things...maybe it just seemed that way now, but there were no shortage of heavily frosted Christmas cookies in the house. My sister and later my brother, would pick one cookie that we each decorated to leave out for Santa. God bless our relatives who came over and knew with us, there was no way they were gonna get away with eating just one cookie.
This I remember as being a very fun afternoon or evening. Christmas music playing for sure. Nothing seemed to get us even more ready for Dec. 25 than making cookies on an ice cold December day. Aside a few store bought Christmas cookies/treats, Christmas cookies and assorted treats are best when the come from your own kitchen. They not only come from your kitchen but from your heart. My lovely wife has made some unspeakably amazing Christmas treats this year which include peppermint biscotti, egg nog fudge and snickerdoodles. You have no idea. And I know in some sugar overdosing sorta way, these are a small sign of love.
That's why the process of Christmas cookie making is such an important one. A simple pastime and expression of knowledge and love that one is never too old for. These are the things that matter most. Maybe that's what Christmas is all about in the end, an expression of love. An expression that exists in many many many different ways, making it all the more fun.
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