Christmas cookie day

What is Christmas cookie day, you might ask. You might surmise it's a day to eat cookies. As fabulous as that might be, no.  Very few people can handle the sugar rush.   If you guessed that it's the day of cookie baking, you would be right.

I started this when my kids started elementary school.   Before that time, I did the cookies the way my mom had done it, a batch every few days.   As I got everything more organized over the years,  there was a weekend to decorate (thanksgiving weekend), a day to bake, days to go shopping,  days to go to see the elementary school programs for Christmas.

Christmas cookie baking started taking on a life of its own.   My husband wanted his family favorites. I still wanted mine.  I wanted to add a few new ideas that my kid's wanted.  We made chocolate chip cookies,  peanut butter cookies, peanut blossom cookies, oatmeal cookies,  soft sugar cookies.  I added gingerbread men,  cutout sugar cookies,  rum balls,  candy and still more cookies over the next couple years. 

As I pulled out each recipe,  I recalled the giver of and the making of each recipe.  Kass gave mom the soft sugar cookies when I was 8 or 9.  I remembered the year Mom forgot to add one of the ingredients.  She knew that she missed something minor by the flavor.  She finally worked it down to the salt.  Yes even a small thing like that can change the flavor.  We got double the yummy cookies that year.  Kass also gave my Mom the frosting recipe that we adapted to different flavors to frost these cookies.  So much better than store bought canned frosting.

Mom taught me to roll the peanut butter cookies when I was 6.  We didn't agree on what the directions said about size.  I lost that argument since I didn't really understand the size of a walnut and the fact that we needed to get 60 cookies from the recipe.   The peanut blossom cookies were given by a family friend named Bobbie.   She had a cookie day too.  She baked a lot of fancier cookies than we chose to do.  Bobbie also worked with a friend who had experience with some of the techniques my family didn't have.

My mother in law gave the oatmeal cookies.  She spent time telling me about each of her kids favorite ways to make them. Surprisingly a number of them liked them slightly burnt on the bottom.  Raisins and chocolate chips or peanut butter chips were top favorites.  She liked that she got an extra dose of something healthy into her kids.  I like them in spite of hating cooked oatmeal and I add an extra cup of oats.. She really liked adding raisins to the cookie dough.  A sister in law added chocolate chips and raisins.  I'm divided on this.  The raisins seem too sweet for the chocolate chips.  However, the kids liked them and to a point that is who they were made for.

The chocolate chip cookies were courtesy of the nestle company recipe.  The basic cookie recipe is one that I have seen in many cookbooks and on many different candy bags.  My kids broke the rules one year by determining that chocolate chips, nuts and several small candies should be added to the same batch of cookies.  It was interesting and less than successful.  There wasn't enough dough to hold all the candy together and they ran into each other and burned fast to the pans.  Lessons learned.

I added things over the years.  I deleted a few that were not popular.  I added sand tarts early on. Mom loved sand tarts and would buy them at the local bakery.  She couldn't make them or didn't want to.  I think it was equal parts.  We learned a few things with these like don't use the fill with cold water type of rolling pin to roll any cookies out.  The idea is good but fails in execution.  The problem?  The cold rolling pin sweats in the warm to hot kitchen turning the cookie dough/flour into glue and causing sticking.  That was my addition to the failures, among others.  We could counter it by using a stockinette cover on the pin but that negates the cold.  The part that messed my mom up was that she didn't use enough flour to prevent sticking.  But they were fun as long as I did the rolling.  We made them with walnut halves decorating, a dash of cinnamon to decorate, colored sugar, colored jimmies.

I added gingerbread men but not gingerbread houses.  They are beautiful but the building was too much for kids.  They really liked the royal icing we used to decorate them.  The decorating them with raisins and fruits and fun stuff was a fail for us.  We tried adding before baking.  Stuff fell off.  We tried adding after baking.  Stuff really fell off.  We tried using the royal icing to glue stuff on.  It got knocked off in storage.  One good thing about my recipe for the ginger bread men was that there was a lot of ginger in there.  They were a good antidote to the too much celebrating nausea that seemed to happen when there were back to back holiday parties.

We tried stained glass sugar cookies one year.  They are beautiful in the picture.  For us they were a big fail.  Using a large cookie cutter, 4 - 6 inches, you cut out the sugar cookies a little thicker than usual.  Now cut the "windows" using a knife.  Make sure to keep at least a third of an inch wall around each "window".    Remove the centers.  Fill with crushed hard candies, keeping colors separated.  Bake.  First don't crush the candies to dust.  Keep the candies in larger chunks.  Second, use a steady hand to cut the window parts.  Straight lines are nicer to look at.  Third, line your cookie sheet with parchment paper.  That candy will melt and run under the cookie.  Don't line with foil.  The foil will get stuck to the candy and not come off in one piece.  The flecks of foil show up as dark spots and make the "windows" look dirty.

I used to drag the ingredients to my mom's house or in later years a friend's house, but about the time my kids hit junior high school I stopped that.  Anyone who wanted in could come to my house.  Moving a bakery is not fun.  Once my kids were out of the house, I pretty much stopped cookie day.  The next generation had taken over the desserts for the most part in the various family parties and did things that interested them.  One year we had 14 pumpkin rolls and more variations of chocolate chip cookies than we wanted. That year was a disappointment for one of the younger "kids".  I didn't even make rum balls.  This is one of the cookies that parents (more specifically, grandma and great grandma) wouldn't let the kids have until they were of age due to the rum.  There wasn't that much rum but to keep people happy, the kids waited mostly.  One of the girls was just of age to have some of the rum balls and there were none.  I'm making her a batch this year.  Just for her.

Try a few of these wonderful cookies.  Or share your favorites.  Who knows, with grandkids close by I now have more reason to bake cookies again.  Just not in such huge quantities....