THE BAKING OF COOKIES
I am a big fan of the cookies. (Hence the ongoing battle of the paunch!) Generally, I am too lazy to make them myself (Even the warm-n-serve variety often seems far too much effort for someone at my level of laziness!) so I most often make do with the packaged variety but Christmas is the yearly exception. On the day of Christmas Eve (think about it - it makes sense.) The Boy and I bake Christmas cookies. It's a father/son thing. Yea, I know: doesn't sound particularly manly, but we enjoy it. The Wife wants no part of the process (she cant' even stand to come into the kitchen while we do this. The mere sight of the mess we make gives her heart palpitations!) We bake us up some chocolate chip, sugar cookies, and a large batch of butter cookies (The Wife's favorite!). We put on Christmas CD's (Boy's choice) and spend a good 3-4 hours destroying the kitchen (We DO clean it up! Well . . . we do, but The Wife cleans it a second time, muttering under her breath about useless males . . .) The sugar and butter cookies are rolled, cut into Christmas type shapes and decorated by The Boy.
Of course, as each sheet of cookies comes out of the oven and is placed on the cooling rack, it is very important that we both sample a cookie while it is still warm. (This is strictly a quality control issue!) Large glasses of cold milk are required as palette cleansers between each round of delectable munchies! Once cool, the cookies (that are left!) get placed into our special air-tight Christmas Cookie jar, which serves no other purpose within our home for the remainder of the year (cookies just don't last long enough 'round here to warrant placing them in a jar!)
No, we do not share out these cookies with anyone else. They are strictly for In-Home use. (And they serve a very important function in our home, which will be covered in my next post! Tune in for more geekiness, loyal readers!) My mother-in-law does the major cookie baking for family distribution, so we don't want to compete. Of course, since we ARE using her cookie recipes, the additional package she gives us each year is just a lovely extra buffer, lest we run out before the New Year!
It's a small tradition, I know. Doesn't seem like much, but to me it's one of the highlights of the season. I look forward to that day all year. I enjoy the hell out of just hanging with The Boy and telling bad jokes and stories as we mix up cookie dough. We almost always wind up talking about family history and what Christmas was like for me and The Wife as kids. It's a good time to pass along some of the things that I found important to my son.
Plus, it's just a helluva lot of fun!
Later!
3 comments:
As a kid, my family would make sugar cookies and decorate them. My mom had a side business as a cake decorator so there was always boatloads of frosting hanging around, and I learned how to use frosting bags and decorating tips at an early age, so everything was veryu professional looking.
What we did to differentiate our cookies from the mundane was use the Halloween cookie cutters but place Santa hats on the witches and jack-o-lanterns and such.
Even as a child I was quite the dork.
Sounds just lovely. These are the things great memories are made of. Traditions are what make the holidays so special, after all.
Happy holidays!
SRH - professional looking? Dude, I'm jealous! My santas tend to look like a red and white platytpus that didn't make it across the highway in time! :-)
Nienke - I agree 100% Thanks, and I hope you have a great holiday too!
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