Happy Christmas

When I was little, one of my favorite activities around the holidays every year was making oodles of Christmas cookies to give away to friends/family/neighbors/co-workers. (except for that one year we made the salt dough Christmas ornaments with the alphabet cookie cutters in everyone's initials. That beat cookies). My mom would spend HOURS with the three of us making dough, cutting out the shapes, baking and decorating the cookies... gobs of confectioner's sugar everywhere and food-coloring stained little kid hands. Sprinkles, silver balls, Christmas carols.... culminating in cracked out cranky kids, an exhausted mom, and a bunch of curly-ribbon clad cookie pacages. That my mother would then make us deliver with her. Thankfully we lived on a prep school campus, and most of this could be achieved by walking.

This year I coerced the Spawn into making Christmas cookies with me. He was a little trooper and put up with my Christmas cookie shenanigans replete with carols playing, and plastic cookie cutters. I am very thankful to the Spawn for letting me have that day of Christmas cheer (he got to play a fair share of videogames, too, so I know he stayed happy), and happy for us not ending up cracked out or cranky.

Granted we would have been done a lot faster if I could get more than one 15x10 cookie sheet in the oven at a time. Someday!

Roll and flip. Roll and flip.

Cut out those shapes - as close together as you can!

Ready to go in the oven.

Color Mixologist.

Decorating.

Ginger cookies. Notice the Airstream Custom oven. Teensy yet effective.

Drying*

My fave**

*They got 3/4 of the way dry and then it started raining BUCKETS. Since the Airstream is a tin can, not much of the humidity made it back outside. Most of it got sucked up by my cookies. Only the few duds I had set aside for family consumption (another family tradition) survived the great humidity of 2011.

**even this one bit the dust. >sad face<