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For as long as I can remember, it’s been a tradition in our family to make Christmas cookies and give them away to the people in our lives. People we love, people we don’t see enough of, people that live close to us, people that used to live close to us, teachers, colleagues, and life-long friends.
Ask me how to get on the Christmas cookie list, and I may joke that you either have to name your kid after one of us or knock off someone else that’s already on the list. But honestly, say one wrong word about the cookies or give us a “suggestion” on what you would do better, and you’re off the list. Don’t even jest that you don’t need cookies…’cause you won’t get any. Just ask my friend who told me she had put on a few pounds and didn’t need cookies one year, so I sent them to her address with just her partner’s name on them, and a note enclosed saying he didn’t have to share because she told me she didn’t need any. Needless to say, she never made that mistake again.
How the Baking Marathon Started
But seriously, the tradition started with my mom and her oldest sister when my mom was about 8 years old. My aunt would make fruitcakes, and Mom would make little spritz cookies with a set my grandma gave to her. Grandma put Mom’s cookies out at the family Christmas celebration that first year, and Mom’s cookies were so popular that Grandma asked her to make more and more each year.
When Mom got married, Grandma would give her money to make cookies for the family celebration, and Mom’s cookies got increasingly more elaborate. She started taking them to the holiday parties she was invited to and giving them to the older people who lived in her neighborhood. Everyone loved them! And a family tradition was born.
When Making All the Cookies Became a Tradition
I truly don’t remember not making cookies at Christmas. I remember the year our pipes froze, and we had to wash dishes in a wash pan in the bathtub. I remember dropping cookies using a tablespoon and being instructed to keep them all the same size…ok, I don’t remember that part because I wasn’t trusted to drop cookies…But I remember my sister dropping cookies using a tablespoon and being instructed to keep them all the same size. I remember having a dark-colored cookie sheet and a light-colored cookie sheet and having to swap them in the oven midway through baking to make sure the cookies all ended up the same color. I remember the old-school nut chopper that, if you chopped too hard, made the nuts at the bottom into a fine powder, instead of making them uniform in size. I remember getting in trouble for licking our fingers while we were baking. I remember my mom staying on us to instill the proper technique so each and every cookie was beautiful and did not look like a 6 and 8-year-old made them. I remember the year I lived far away, and my mom and sister sent me a picture of my baby niece with a mixing bowl and a spoon, “mixing” cookies, because I still hadn’t graduated to “mixer”. But most of all, I remember how happy people were to get our cookies at Christmas.
Each year, we bake more than 200 of each of 16 different kinds of cookies and 5 types of candy, plus dog treats for our furry friends. There are cookies we’ve made since the beginning, like Holly Wreaths, and other cookies that have come and gone over the years. We all have our favorites, though they’re all our Mom’s favorites.
How We Make it Work Every Year
We’ve instituted rules like: Christmas Cookie Baking Weekend is not the time to try a new recipe, leave the spatula where it belongs, and never ever ever use real butter in the Russian Tea cookies. We all know our “roll”; Mom is the dishwasher and task floater, my sister is all-time mixer, my oldest niece puts the finishing touches on and is the master of lemon zesting, my youngest niece is the decorator, and I’m a professional cookie scooper.
We’ve faced questions like, “How do you half an egg?” Why do we have so much powdered sugar left? Where did the spatula go? How did we lose an entire pan of cookies? Who has the New Kids On The Block Christmas Album cued up? How did we do this before we had all of these new gadgets? Are we getting too old for this? And, do you think we can do this last batch in the toaster oven? (To be fair, that last question was asked at 11 o’clock of the second night when the cookies we were working on took 20 minutes in the oven and we were exhausted…and Mom went to sleep early and wasn’t around to reprimand us.)
Cookies and Christmas
Over the years, lots of things have changed, my nieces are old enough to do more than put M&Ms on top of the cookies, we have a cookie scoop that is perfectly measured to keep all the cookies the same size, we use silicone baking mats and have a convection oven so the cookies bake evenly, we have a professional size mixer…even though I can’t use it because I still haven’t graduated to “mixer”.
My mom didn’t expect her little spritz cookies to turn into an annual weekend project where we bake and box more than 3,500 cookies and candy pieces. I can’t imagine a Christmas without it. But the tradition and the joy our cookies bring remain, and hopefully will even when I’m so old that my nieces and their kids are making cookies without nuts because I can’t chew them, like we used to do for my Grandpa!
