Christmas Cookie Baking

In movies baking Christmas cookies is always conveyed as peaceful. Idyllic. Smiling people sit around a nice, clean table and calmly, yet somehow efficiently, get all their baking done and the end result of all their efforts is just as lovely as the romantic process of making the cookies.

Each year I can't shake that imagery. Each year I envision, at the very least, a table free of red, green and white sticky icing and a floor free of a generous heaping of different colored sugars. I hope, each year, that the simple process of rolling out, baking and decorating of simple sugar cookies will take less than two and a half hours.

And though things never go as I imagined, and though the clean-up takes almost as long as the rolling, baking and decorating, I always forget how much fun it is to watch the kids heap a mound of green sugar on the toe of one gingerbread man while leaving the rest bare, or watch them generously mound and mix the red and green icings on an unsuspecting Santa Claus cut-out.

This year was no exception, and although it took far longer than it should have, I am proud to say I did not decorate even one cookie; the big kids did it all (Elisabeth was napping), I was only minimally frustrated a few times ("Please stop sticking the cookie cutters in the flour and spilling it all over the floor!") and I now have some Christmas cookies to share on Christmas Eve. Hooray!