Advent Calendar - December 8 - Christmas Cookies

Did your family or ancestor make Christmas cookies? How did you help? Did you have a favorite cookie?

Unfortunately, my mother was not much of a baker. She seldom ever made any kind of cookies. However, once my sister and I got to be of an age to begin to cook and bake, we did.

I can remember once Mama bought these aluminum pans that had Christmas cookie shapes in them. You were to make a cookie dough, of your favorite cookie recipe, and then press the dough into these shapes on the pans. [I think she had 2 or 3 of these very thin, aluminum pans.] My sister and I would make a sugar cookie dough and press it into the shapes. They never quite came out looking right. But it was sure fun trying to get them right! And what we didn’t get into the pans, we would eat raw. [Oh, yes, this new-fangled cookie dough stuff is really quite the old delicacy!]

I can’t remember ever hearing Mama or Daddy talk about their parents making cookies, but I am sure they must have, as both were from very rural areas, and it would have been difficult at best to buy cookies. I would like to think my grandmothers made cookies for their little ones at one some time! Neither baked cookies, however, by the time my sister and I came along.

When my own children came along, we would sometimes spend days making cookies for the holidays. I remember one Christmas when my oldest three children were babies that I gave homemade cookies to all of our friends for gifts that year. I packed them in Christmas gift boxes that I decorated with pictures out of magazines. They were a big hit!

Today I seldom ever make cookies. My dh and I are neither one much for sweets these days. An occasional cookie now and then, maybe, but never a desire for enough that I would bake them!

Still, every once in a while on Christmas Eve, I linger over a cup of egg nog, and gather a couple of sugar cookies to a plate. Funny thing, every Christmas morning when I awaken, that cup is empty and the plate is bare. Dare I say it?

Santa has a sweet tooth!!!