All My Ancestors

December 8 – Christmas Cookies
Did your family or ancestors make Christmas Cookies? How did you help? Did you have a favorite cookie?

My mother didn’t like to cook and she certainly didn’t like to bake.  And her mother, my grandmother, was her model.  So home-baked Christmas cookies are not among my memories.  We were more likely to make fudge, particularly after that recipe for using chocolate chips and marshmallow fluff came out–wasn’t it called “Fantasy Fudge?”  My mom did love sweets, but the easier the better.  We had lots of unbaked cookies, for example–the “boil the sugar, milk, cocoa and butter together, add the oatmeal, and drop onto waxed paper” version.  We didn’t usually add the peanut butter.

However, I had my great Aunt Lorene to come to the rescue.  Aunt Lorene was my maternal grandfather’s sister and she treated cooking like an art.  She let me cook with her, teaching me tricks like spraying ice water into the flour and shortening mixture to make a pie crust flaky (my mom’s approach won out–I usually buy Pillsbury pie crusts).  For my birthday in 1965, which is just 11 days after Christmas, she gave me this cooky book:

I’ve used this book a lot.  The cookie recipes are a bit convoluted, as were recipes from that time.  Just above Aunt Lorene’s inscription in this book, you can see that it refers to “teatime.”

Trust me, we didn’t really do teatime in the Texas panhandle, but the brownie and the butterscotch brownies got lots of use, as you can see from the smudged page that has the brownie recipe on it.  I think one of the things I like best about this recipe is that it uses cocoa rather than unsweetened chocolate.  We were much more likely to have cocoa in the pantry than unsweetened chocolate.

To be truthful, I never thought the Christmas cookie offerings in this cookbook looked all that appetizing.

With no-bake cookies as my reference point, making cookie dough that had to be chilled and rolled out seemed a little daunting.

As an adult, however, I have enjoyed making Christmas cookies.  We have family friends who usually have a cookie party a few weeks before Christmas.  It’s not the usual cookie exchange, but more of a time to get together and see who can make the most outre decorated cookie.  Home-baked cookies are provided, in the usual Christmas shapes, but also some sharks and chickens and other various non-traditional shapes.  Red and green and white icing is provided, but so is purple and yellow and orange.  Are you getting the picture?  It’s a fun evening and all ages participate and have a great time.

My oldest son and I have traditionally make the Christmas cookies at our house.  I labor over the choice of the recipe–you’d think I’d make notes on which ones I prefer.  I typically use recipes I find online–I think the Simply Recipes blog has the ones I’ve used the past couple of years.

Now that my son longer lives here, we still occasionally make and decorate cookies if he is at home for a few days before Christmas.  Making all the colors of icing and using the tubes and tips always takes longer than anticipated, but we get them done.  Then we deliver a plate of 6-8 to our neighbors.

Christmas cookies are especially delicious now that I know how much effort goes into them–a labor of love that we will probably make again this year.

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