Christmas Cookies

I grew up in the 70's when more often Christmas trees were real and the huge colored bulb lights and silvery tinsel adorning the crispy pine branches was a common sight. And a rustic manger scene that was probably already decades old when I was a child sat below the shelf under the Zenith TV. There were toy orders from the Sears Catalog ( I tried not to think too hard about why Santa would need us to do that) and there were also the homemade Christmas cookies.

These cookies were sugar ones made into different cookie-cutter holiday shapes like trees, wreaths and reindeer. My mom would bake dozens of these cookies and more often then not burned the edges, making them too crispy. That didn't matter though because we girls, all six of us, would sit together every year up until we were teenagers and have a cookie-icing party to cover any baking flaw. There were all kinds of licorice, vanilla and butter flavored extracts to mix with the food-colored icing. The alcohol odor was strong with these extracts but to me it smelled festive. You had to be careful not to add to much to the sugary icing so as not to make it runny. We decorated the cookies with red hots cinnamon candy, tiny sweet silver balls, red and green sugar and colored sprinkles.

Looking back, I realize this cookie-decorating ritual I shared with my sisters year after year was among my favorite memories of past holidays. At the time it seemed we were just doing a fun chore while talking , laughing and sometimes annoying each other. These cookie decorating parties often went late into the night until we were so tired we couldn't ice another cookie (or eat another broken cookie lol). As childhood gave way to adolescence, the yearly cookie parties fell away and the annual fresh pine Christmas tree was replaced with an artificial one.
To be honest, I wasn't crazy about getting the dry pine needles out of the carpet, a chore I was often assigned to, so I didn't miss having a real tree as much. The cookie-decorating parties though are very missed, but I am glad for the festive memories.