Thanks to Thomas MacEntee of  GeneaBloggers.com for today’s Advent Calendar Challenge!  Each day, reading the other blog posts and then writing my own has taken me on a “Sentimental Journey” through Christmases Past!  Fortunately, I haven’t met up with Scrooge in any of them!

Christmas Cookies

Did your family or ancestors make Christmas Cookies? How did you help? Did you have a favorite cookie?

My mom wasn’t all that big on making cookies.  I mean, she would make them, but once they were in the oven, well, they might stay there a tad too long.

And who knows,  maybe that was her subtle way to get me to take over the cookie baking once I got old enough!

No Pillsbury Dough Boy for my mom…

When I was really young, about my granddaughter’s age, somewhere from five to eight years of age, Mom was really big on making yummy sugar cookie dough (from scratch of course, no Pillsbury doughboy with his handy cookie tubes back then!) and letting us cut them out.

She did this pretty often, actually, and not always just at Christmas time.    Sometimes it was my nephews and I, ( we all being nearly of the same age) and sometimes it was with my friends and classmates.

We would dive in, flour on the table, flour on our noses and hands, (and sometimes on the floor!) and share the rolling pins and the cookie cutters.

We had so many cookie cutters that they filled up a shoe box. There were Christmas trees and reindeer, Christmas stars, and little lambs and cows. We had round ones, and diamond shaped ones, and little Porky Pig ones. (Geeminy, wonder where those all are?) Time to go on a treasure hunt!

We were always on the scout for new cookie cutters and we usually brought a few new ones home each Christmas.

Shortly after I married I began to host my own sugar cookie party for my little niece. The first year, she was probably only three or four, and I think we only got two or three cookies baked in one piece that first year!

Did I mention that we always had to double (or triple) the recipe to make sure at least some of the cookies got baked instead of eaten in dough form.  (That was before we knew that all kinds of illnesses resulted from eating raw eggs in cookie dough) What a devastating discovery that was!