Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Advent Calendar--Christmas Cookies

During my childhood I don't remember making a specific kind of cookie for Christmas.  I remember making sugar cookies, oatmeal cookies, bar cookies, brownies, peanut butter cookies, and a cookie like a macaroon made from corn flakes.  My grandmother made filled cookies with her homemade plum preserves or with raisins.
With my own daughters we usually made sugar cookies and cut out Christmas shapes from them.  One year I got a set of cookie cutters that form the nativity. 
There have been cookie exchanges where each person bakes one kind of cookie then brings a dozen cookie and trades their cookies for different cookies that others have brought.  That can be a fun way to get a variety of cookies.
There are wonderful memories of plates of cookies and other goodies being left on the doorstep anonymously. 
The plates of cookies given in friendship are wonderful.  The Christmas after my mother died a neighbor of my grandmother gave us a plate of Greek cookies.  She was from Greece and I really had a hard time understanding what she said.  The saying "It's all Greek to me" really meant something to me after I met her.  Those Greek cookies were wonderful.  Perhaps it was the love that she shared with us that made them taste so good.
Of course a couple of cookies always had to be left for Santa.
Cookies have made Christmas a fun time especially as I've spent time with my daughters making them or as I have shared them with others.

1 comment:

Gini said...

I have always wanted to do a cookie exchange. I think that would be so much fun, especially for us living in a culdesac. We have a very close knit neighborhood. May have to host one someday!