The Van Zante Family: Christmas Cookies

I make lots of cookies throughout the year, but sugar cookies are usually saved for the Christmas season. Why I don't know, its just the way it is. Its just like all the other goodies I made (this year: Oreo balls, candy pretzels, marshmallow popcorn, chocolate covered peanut butter crackers... no fudge...yet!), for some reason they are just saved for Christmas time. And each year, the kids dig in, almost literally to their elbows, to help.

Sarah and I made the dough the day before to be refrigerated over night. I've always enjoyed baking, even as a young girl. But even through all those years of baking, the perfect sugar cookie recipe eluded me. Then I happened upon this one through none other than Google. No wonder my younger-years sugar cookies were less than desirable... we didn't have the wonder of the world wide web back in the day to look for recipe perfection! (One day, I'm going to tell my grandkids (great grandkids?) that I didn't know what the Internet was until I was 20... but by then, the Internet will probably be outdated - or nonexistent - and old school. Like payphones today. Who knows? Just like one day I'll tell them I was born in the 1980s and it'll sound incredibly old just because it has "19" as the year. But getting off the rabbit trail and back to the recipe concept...) I happened upon this recipe and its fantastic! Its a shame I wasted two decades of what could have been delicious sugar cookie heaven to find it!

(P.S. Please, please, please ignore my ugly kitchen... its taking a while to decide and actually do whatever we're going to do to finish re-finishing it. The wallpaper is off, so right now its reeeeeeeeally ugly!)

The before. All the stuff we need. So neat and tidy.

The during. Not so neat and tidy. And believe me, it got much, much more not so neat and tidy before all was done and cleaned! All in the name of fun, right?!

After getting a couple of pictures, the camera took a little break for sake of my sanity. Between keeping kids from falling off chairs, cutting into already cut cookies, not eating the cookie dough (I'm a little hypocritical in this area: I sneak samples of cookie dough all the time when the kids aren't looking, but they absolutely cannot! I figure I can deal with my own stomach cramps, but can't handle their's.), avoiding them stamping out their own or each other's pinky fingers, rolling and rerolling dough and taking out and putting cookies in the oven every six minutes, the camera just wasn't a priority. So skip ahead an hour, and you get this:

Nine Christmas trees, nine ornaments, seven gingerbread men, eleven stockings, nine candy canes, a dozen snowmen, and elevan stars... give or take a cookie or two. I glazed them all, set them out to dry and then called the kids back in...

They each got to decorate 10 cookies of their choice. All by themselves. Without me breathing down their neck about TOO MUCH FROSTING! Kids have got to be kids, you know! They really only had seven things to choose from, but it was so overwhelming to them that it took a while to decide. I like how Big Brother Caleb is encouraging Sarah on which ones to choose.

So Caleb looks absolutely bored in this picture, but he was having a good time...really! He was just focusing on all his hard work!

And the finished product! The kids with their cookies and the ones that I did in the forefront. Homemade cookies with homemade glaze and homemade frosting..... yummy! (I guess "yummy"... I don't really care for cookies and haven't had one, but I've been told they're good!)