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Hi, I'm Darryll and I live in Pullman, Washington with my wife and two kids. I'm a licensed Architect and am employed as a Project Manager at Washington State University. In addition, I have my own business doing residential designs in the greater Palouse area. I am a self-taught pianist, song-writer and singer and am involved in the music department at my local church.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Christmas Cookies!

There's just something about Christmas Cookies! There are so many great kinds of cookies at Christmas, and my mom made some of the best! Some of her best were shortbread, lemon bars, spritz and some that were called bars by the fire.
 
My sibs and I started a tradition when we were young kids. With mom's help, we started making our own Christmas cookies. We made a big double or quadruple batch of sugar cookie dough. Then we would roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut out dozens of different shapes. Oh – we had lots of normal Christmas shapes: Santas, reindeer, candy canes, angels, Christmas trees and all the other traditional icons. We ALSO had things like sharks, cars, a cowboy boot, giraffes, flip flops, hearts, hands, airplane, a pineapple, ducks, kangaroos, cows, and whole bunch more – a pretty funny wide assortment of odd things.
We would then make up a bunch of bowls of different colored icing and little bowls of nuts, chocolate chips, all sorts of sprinkles,and  a ton of different types of toppings. And then the fun would begin. We would spend hours baking and decorating the cookies. They weren’t especially delicious, but we had a lot of fun making them. It was an entire evening of laughing, singing along with Christmas songs, making cookies and generally having a good time with family members.
We have continued this for all these years. I’ve included a bunch of pics from one of our most recent times. These days, there are spouses, kids and nieces and nephews, but we always make time for it. It’s as much a part of our Christmas celebration as all the “normal” stuff.  Although - if you look at some of the cookies, you'll see there's few of them that are not very normal and reflect the late hour at which we were finishing up the decorating.  You can click on the pics to enlarge them and see all our fun shapes!

What fun and unique traditions does your family do for the holidays?


6 comments:

LaraAnn said...

I like all those different shapes of cookies. It sounds like your family has alot of fun making them. We did have a couple of cookie cutters but didn't use them much. I think it was just the basic tree and santa. My mom and I enjoyed making chocolate chip, peanut butter, sugar and oatmeal cookies. Sometimes I'd make magic cookie bars - good but very sweet. Those lemon bars sound delicious. I haven't made cookies in many years. My brother will be making chocolate chip ones next week and I can't wait to have some.

Ruth Cox aka abitosunshine said...

Fabulous fun! How wonderful that you continue the cookie tradition!

Marco said...

This is awesome. I love the idea of all the different bowls of icing colours and toppings.

I've started writing about the Christmas traditions we have but baking cookies normally wasn't one of them. We normally bought our cookies.

I might try a batch or two this year with my wee ones.

Blast from the Past said...

LaraAnn: No matter what types of cookies we all have, you gotta love cookies. Tis the seaaon... between work, family, what the kids bring home from school, neighbors, friends, etc. - it's a veritable cookie and treat smorgasbord! Hope you enjoy your this year.

Sunshine: It is fun, and I can't wait - we'll be doing it again on this Thursday.

Marco: It is a lot of fun! You ought to try it... BTW - I look forward to reading about your Christmas traditions!

Ruth Cox aka abitosunshine said...

Sounds like the perfect Merry Christmas, LaraAnn!

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Unknown said...

Beautiful! You guys really outdid yourselves!!