Decorating holiday cookies

I suspect that my mother dreaded Christmas. For her, it meant extra hours in the kitchen making treats reserved for the holidays. Naturally my two sisters and I helped, especially in making and decorating sugar cookies. She never let on that she didn’t look forward to it or that our assistance prolonged the job.

She mixed and rolled out the dough and we cut out circles and Christmas shapes—trees, bells, Santa heads, angels—with metal cookie cutters.We needed lots of these because that’s what everyone took to the Christmas program at the one-room school.

My mother or older sister made a powdered sugar icing in a big bowl and put about half of that into two or three smaller bowls. We added red food coloring to one bowl, green to another, and sometimes yellow or blue to another.

We spread the white frosting on most of the round cookies and then either sprinkled colored sugar crystals on them or made faces of patterns with red hots, the pill-sized candies that I loved. I put red hots on the green-frosted Christmas trees and on Santa’s white face as eyes, too.

My more artistic and patient sisters experimented more with combining colored frostings, creating white ropes on green trees and outlining white bells in red. When an experiment failed, that cookie was condemned to go right into our mouths. We had a lot of failures with our first batch. As appetites dulled, hands became more skillful.

A few days before Christmas each year I get the urge to bake cookies. Usually I overcome it. Maybe next year.

 —Carolyn Mulford

 

Comments

[Jennifer Bowles]

This year, don't overcome it. Enjoy the simple pleasures in life. :)