I have fond memories of doing this when I was a young child (cookies, candies…). (It seems I remember being particularly helpful when I was 5 years old or so–I mean it’s important to have someone lick up the leftover batter which can’t be spooned out of the bowl–right?)
But I have been picking up the impression that people are doing this a lot less anymore–too much work, easier to get stuff at the store…
So Dopers, do you have any such memories? Are you making holiday goodies with children this year?
Oh, yeah! Mom had dozens of different cookie cutters around, for Christmas and Halloween, but my sisters did the baking. Mom wasn’t allowed in the kitchen when she was growing up and so never really learned how to cook.
The only little ones in the family belong to my niece and her husband; they’re staying at home in Oregon this year.
I remember doing cut-out sugar cookies once but more like as a 10-year-old. I remember mom got tired of it before I did.
This year my mom went to GFS and bought 6-dozen, frozen pre-cut sugar cookies. She baked them and then had my aunt (her baby sister) and my niece (3 years old) decorate them. Turned out awesome!
Most of my friends seem to be doing gingerbread house kits with their kids this year. My one friend who is Super Mom did gingerbread houses and iced cookies.
Yep. My mom used to let us help her bake and decorate sugar cookies and gingerbread men. She loved to bake though, so we were always helping stir batter, licking frosting off beaters, and things like that.
My husband once tried to decorate a gingerbread house with the help of our preschool son. He handed over the candies one by one, not noticing that our son was consuming them. Hee, hee.
The five-year-old and I did a gingerbread-house kit for the third year running. We’ve also made a few batches of fudge - not the fancy kind where you need a thermometer and have to understand ‘the soft ball stage’, the easy kind where you melt chocolate into condensed milk and then add smashed Oreos or pecans or cranberries or whatever you feel like (the smashed Oreos are particularly good because what five-year-old doesn’t want to hit a bag of cookies with a hammer?), and then stick it in a baking tray in the fridge for a few hours. The one-and-a-half-year-old can even help (‘Thing 2 ELP!!!’) by pouring things into the mix. We’ve been giving it to various people as presents.
Last year we made cut-out cookies, but this year due to various stuff that hasn’t happened.
I don’t think we ever made Christmas stuff with my parents when I was little; they’re not the baking type. Neither am I, which is why we’re doing the simplest stuff imaginable.
Cutout cookies are far from the simplest thing imaginable. In fact, they’re the only thing I actually bake that makes me want to lie down in a dark room. Anything more complicated, I don’t do.
I was pleasantly surprised at the difference a year makes – last year, my 2-almost-3 year old was “helping” with holiday cookies in the most stressful sense of the word, but this year, my 3-almost-4 year old was for real helpful - she can crack eggs into a bowl without dropping the shells, she can mix with a spoon, she had a good time rolling dough into balls for snickerdoodles and then rolling them in cinnamon and sugar, and smooshing the Hershey’s kiss into the peanut butters. I also thought it was really impressive that at one point, she said she was getting tired – and she had been working on the cookies for a while, so I said I would finish up. But she looked in the bowl and said there was only a little left, so she wanted to do the last ones.
It also helped that I planned a little better this year too, doing the easier cookies, the snickerdoodles and the M&M cookies and the peanut butter kisses, with her help … and left the more labor-intensive cookies for times after she was in bed.
This is definitely the key for making it a good memory and not finishing with a stressed out screaming match.
It’s also the key for raising kids who can feed themselves. Start with easy items, low expectations and watch them want to learn. If you spend all your time working on perfection for something that’s out of their reach they’ll never want to cook or bake.
We did cookies every year with my kids while they were growing up, now they help when we do baking days with our friends kids.
I’ve done cookies with my kids since they were little - we’re now at the point where the 10 year old does them with some help and supervision from me, the 12 year old essentially just needs light supervision, and the 14 year old is way too cool to bake with her Dad.
Thankfully, we’re past the point where the final step is for each of them to “decorate” the cookies with half a lb. of frosting, then hand them to me and say “I MADE THIS FOR YOU DADDY! EAT IT! ISN’T IT DELICIOUS!” as I choke down their 3000 calorie treats.
