Christmas Cookie Memories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is a time of year for traditions and memories, so I thought it might be nice to share them with each other.

For me, Christmas cookies have always been a highlight of the season. Not just the eating, but the baking. All the womenfolk, four generations at one point, would get together on a Saturday near Christmas and we would commit Mass Cookies. Dozens, and dozens, and dozens of them. Rolled and bar and drop. Plain and frosted and dipped in melted chocolate. On and on it went, taking up a whole day.

The best, imho, were a cardamom flavored sugar cookie that was rolled and cut out and decorated. Maybe because the decoration of those cookies was one of the first tasks we were allowed to tackle as children. We always used simple metal strip cookie cutters, the same every year: bells and stars, trees and hearts, and angels. Especially angels. Usually we decorated the angels with frosting, but one year my mother absent-mindedly started sprinkling green sugar on a sheet of angels. I said, “Stop! That’s wrong!” but after a few seconds she smiled and said, “No. These are my Girl Scout Angels, just like you and your sister.”

And so the tradition got tweaked. Every year since, for decades now, we’ve made Girl Scout Angels, now in memory of my mother.
A final part of that cookie’s tradition: after all the dough has gone through a first roll, and the leftover bits rerolled and cut, then the final remaining pieces are formed into a ball and rolled out into a simple blob. That gets sliced into serving sized pieces, sprinkled with a melange of everything we’d been using to decorate the ‘good’ cookies, and baked up.

These were the cookies we kids were allowed to devour right then – but first we had to come up with a name for what that cookie ‘looked like.’ After a while we started just calling them by states: hey, any rectangular piece looks like Colorado or Wyoming, right? And one with a curved edge can be Tennessee.

This year, one of the grade schoolers looked at the blob before it had been cut and declared that it looked like Australia. (Sorry, Aussies, I don’t think it really did, other than both being imperfect circular blobs.) So the consumption of this years ‘state’ cookies required reference to an Atlas, so the kids could name the ‘right’ Australian state. :smiley:

So, how about the rest of you? What are your special cookie memories?

2

My mother and sister always baked cookies, and I continue the tradition for my wife and me. My sister began baking them on her own for friends, and it snowballed into a huge effort (she had a lot of friends) that began a couple of months before, with the product going in the freezer until she was ready to package them up in tins that she collected over the years. Now that she’s gone, her daughters are carrying on the tradition.

The smell and taste of those buttery cookies is a vivid memory, and while I’ve improved on one or two of her recipes, nothing can compete with childhood memories of coming in from a frigid outdoors to a warm, aromatic kitchen.

3

I can just barely remember my great-grandmother being well enough to make big, fat, soft, drop sugar cookies, which she would sprinkle with green and red sugar. I have never again tasted anything like those cookies - among other things, they contained sour cream, which sounds like it should be horrible in cookies but they were soooo good.

I can also remember the cookies my grandmother sent us every year. Most of them were fancy and just confused me as a child, but she made the world’s greatest seven layer bars, and also chocolate rum balls that were practically flammable. I’m quite sure the first time I got drunk, it was on those little pieces of heaven.

Needless to say neither of them every wrote the recipes down… sigh

4

We used to make sugar cookies every year. I still have most of the cookie cutters. We would decorate them with various kinds of sprinkles and hang them on the Christmas tree with thread. The camels were my favorite. (And yes, we ate them off of the tree)

5

My kith and kin have done this for well over a decade and are doing it this year. We always deliver a trayful to the nearby fire department, and they’ve come to watch for it. Those smiles are almost as warm as the cookies.

6

I’ve been thinking about my mom for the last few days and that what I found funny must have been a frustration for her. And she handled it so well.

She was a working mom during WWII and I think she was anxious to get back to what she enjoyed doing and making some income for us. Her talents never were in the household arts.

This must have been her first attempt at making my grandmother’s Christmas cookies and she was trying to make those spritz cookies that are long and flat like ribbons. It was a hand-screwed cookie press and she must have had trouble getting the dough to start so kept cranking. Suddenly it just kept coming out, stream upon stream, and she was trying to get it all on the sheets.

Three-year-old-daughter, I, was laughing my delighted little head off while she hollered, “Stop! Stop!”

Mom was what you’d have then called high strung and as time went on I later learned that laughing when she was in frustration was a dangerous sport. But she made it into a hilarious happening that we laughed over together for many years.

The spritz were delicious. I still make them and never fail to think of her when I do.

The

7

All those oldsters cooked by the seat of their pants. Heh. Does that translate in Norway?

My Aunt from Norway had a similar one. I had to track it down through some obscure relatives and I’m thinking it may be the one you remember. Or similar.

Would you like it?

8

My great aunt made bad cookies. They weren’t unedible or prone to make you sick. But the consensus from everyone who saw them was that they looked like that novelty fake vomit from the practical joke store. It was this huge secret that everyone kept from her that when she made her cookies, they’d end up getting passed around like a ticking bomb. She was so proud of how everyone loved sharing her cookies. She never realized that we weren’t sharing them. We were getting rid of them. The best tactic was to slip them to someone just as they were walking out the door and wouldn’t be able to “forget” them on the table. Some of us would put them out anonymously at their office and watch them sit there until they were thrown away after New Years Day.

And yet, despite all this it was a fun and humourous part of the holiday. We took it as a game to see who’d get stuck with “The Cookies.”

9

We had snowballs and crullers and those cutouts in the shape of bells, stars, or Santa (those were the kind we’d frost and then hang on the tree.)

One year we put a Santa a little to low on the tree and the guinea pig came along and ate him. If we didn’t get a Christmas that year it wasn’t because we were naughty, it was because the piggy ate Santa.

10

I had a grandmother who baked her ass off every Christmas, and sent me huge jars of cookies with wide metal screw tops. The batches were enough for a family of eight, but we were a family of two.

I still have some of the jars, which have been converted into bins for flour, sugar, corn meal and other bulk items. Some have the original tops she decorated with holiday stickers. The cookies are long gone, but the jars will live forever.

11

My mother made 2 kinds of cookies and we were not allowed to help because the cookies were kind of finicky (plus my mom didn’t like us “helping” in the kitchen). One cookies was spritz made with about 100 pounds of butter and put through the cookie press in Os and Ses. Our last name starts with O so I figured the Os were for Olson. My brother and sister have names that begin with S so I figured the S shapes were for them and was annoyed because there were no cookies in the shape of P. Very rarely would she put sprinkles (official names: jimmies) on the cookies. We liked them plain. The second cookie was called icebox. Another Swedish cookie, with almonds. Fairly plain dough with sliced almonds, formed into a rectangle and put in icebox to solidify. Mom would then slice paper-thin slices (truly you could see through them) and dip them in sugar before baking. YUM! I guess she was right–kids would never have been able to slice the cookies thin enough. Part of their charm was their lack of bulk.

12

Those icebox cookies sound delicious.

13

I wonder if it some variation on rugelach dough that she just made into a drop cookie instead of chilling and making into a rolled, shaped cookie.

14

My mother in law makes soft sour cream cutouts. Wonderful

My own mother makes sour cream cutouts, but hers are hard, the soft ones are better. The trick to the soft ones is oven temperature.

Here is a recipe for sour cream drops you could try: Sour Cream Cookies Recipe: How to Make It

15

This isn’t a memory, but a story from this year.

I went with my daughter over to my mother in law’s to bake Christmas cookies. In the tradition of Christmas cookies - you need six kinds. All are bad for you - sugar and butter and marshmellow and chocolate being used in quantity.

And my mother in law is sprinkling hemp seed in everything because “its good for you.” I suspect the hemp seed isn’t undoing the damage from four pounds of butter!

I went Gluten Free (actually gluten light) a few years ago and its been a six year search for cookie recipes that fill the need for this time of year. Mine was not a brittle and fudge family - it has to be cookies. (I still need a good GF Spritz recipe).