We make something called coconut date balls. I’m not sure they even count as a cookie since they’re not baked. Basically, finely chopped dates, butter, sugar, and egg are cooked on low heat in a skillet until it all starts to thicken up. Stir in chopped pecans and rice krispies and let cool. When cool, roll into balls and roll in coconut. Very labor intensive with all the chopping, stirring and rolling, but they are my favorite holiday treat.
Oh, I’m sold! Heading to the store, don’t wait up! 
It’s a cookie if you applied heat. 
My wife used to make chocolate meringues: basically whipped egg whites with chocolate chips. Delicious.
Pepparkokkar. It’s a Swedish spice cookie I’m positive I’ve mangled the spelling of.
Another vote for pfeffernusse. My german-swiss grandmother loved to bake and always went all out at Christmas. Fifteen kinds of cookies was a kind of minimum.
My sister’s peanut butter and dark chocolate sandwich cookies (also her chocolate chip and her tea cakes and her snickerdoodles, but the peanut butter ones she only makes at Christmas)
Chocolate crinkles
Coconut meringue cookies
As a little Mexican girl, I remember being introduced to typical American holiday treats when we meet our new neighbors from Minneapolis back in 1979. Joanne and her family were rotund and socially forward. All their meals were a large production, planned out weeks in advance to accommodate their 5 kids, freezer bags sharpied with their contents and the date produced. I was in awe with the enormity of their entire lives.
But when Christmas rolled around, that was when I really saw Joanne go all out. Every cookie that you can imagine, rum balls, coconut cut outs, jam filled thumbprints, icebox cookies, pfeffernusse…it was like a dream. It was also the first time I saw a flocked tree, decorated with teal blue ornaments and ice cold blue Christmas lights. It made our multi colored lights Christmas tree look like a patchwork concoction.
Ok so yeah, my favorites were the cookies that were cutout with strawberry jam in the middle.
Snickerdoodles! (Assuming they count as a “holiday cookie,” but that’s pretty much the only time I have them, myself, not being much of a sweets person.) But a well-made snickerdoodle with a little bit of that cream-of-tartar tang to it is simple perfection.
Growing up, though, we always had Polish kolaczki around, so there’s that, too.
Sugar cookies! Yum.
My grandmother (and mom) make a spiral kind of gingersnap cookie for Christmas that is the only essential Christmas cookie, in my mind. I’m fairly sure the recipe is Danish by way of Illinois.
I always make 2 cookies for the holidays, both my grandmother’s recipes. Anginettes and Pizzelles. I also inherited her Pizzelle iron, very old school.
Gramma’s pizzelles, Great Aunt Midge’s nut rolls, my killer rum balls, and anybody’s peanut butter cookies with the Hershey kiss on top!
Peanut butter criss cross cookies.
Haven’t had them in years actually but they were a Christmas staple when I was growing up.
I am thinking of the light colored ones with icing that are in the front of Walmart as you go in. They are what I call soft sugar cookies, with icing.
I believe that they often call them Toll House cookies.
It would be worth a person’s life to get between me and some of those.
I love shortbread. Christmas is the only time I’ll lay down the bucks for a decent cookie. Since nobody else in the family shares the appropriate appreciation I get most of them to myself.
there are so many good cookies. there are reasons very different which make them good cookies.
That’s unpossible to answer.
though Bourbon Ball was always a favorite.