Christmas Cookie Baking Time

David sent me these pictures of their family baking Christmas Cookies. He said that frozen dough that you just plop onto cookie sheets just wouldn't do, so he made these from scratch. I love the way that the girls frosted themselves nearly as much as the cookies.

http://www.4shared.com/dir/5501571/98d99748/sharing.html

David told me that next year he wants a real tree with strings of popcorn and cranberries. What a fun project for the kids. I don't know if you kids remember the years that we made popcorn and cranberry strings for our tree. In those days I was always searching for economical (OK. Let's be truthful here. Cheap is the word.) ways to do things, like decorate our Christmas tree. Store-bought decorations were out of the question financially, so I needed to be inventive. One large bag of popcorn and four bags of cranberries worked wonders for decorating. I can still remember you all sitting on the floor with a bowl of popcorn and another of cranberries, stringing them on heavy thread. I think you ate more popcorn that you strung! When you had several threads full, we tied them together for one long string and wound it around the tree. It looked great, and I still love the look of an old fashioned Christmas with homemade decorations.

Another thing we did was make gingerbread men. We used cinnamon red hot candies for the features and buttons down the front. I had to hide the candies from you, as if I didn't, there would be none left for decorating. I rolled out the dough and cut the shapes, and you kids would decorate. I still had to watch you, though, as more decorations and cookie dough went into mouths than on the cookie sheets. I tried telling you all that raw cookie dough causes worms, but that didn't slow you down any. You come by it naturally. I love chocolate chip cookie dough. We poked holes in the heads of the gingerbread men and strung red yarn through the holes and tied it with a knot. Then we hung them on the tree. As time passed before Christmas, the number of gingerbread men on the tree mysteriously grew fewer and fewer. I didn't buy the excuse that mice had eaten them.

I haven't done much Christmas baking in recent years. Perhaps it is because there are just two of us now, and neither of us needs to be scarffing gingerbread men. But I think I would like to do this again next December, and I think maybe there might be a few grandkids that would like to help.

Love,

Mom