Christmas Cookies

On Friday I decided to be brave and dareing by make sugar cookies with the kids all by myself. Some of you that don't know me that well probably think this is not really that big of a deal. For those of you who know me, you know that I can be quite annal about how my cookies turn out, and anything less then perfection in this area can put me in a bad mood for a few hours at least. Fearlessly I embraced the Christmas spirit and started making the cookie dough. Guinevere was the first to protest, and insisted on being able to see what was going on. Having a baby on the kitchen counter made this process much slower then I would have liked, but I pressed on.


Having plenty of open counter space and two new small rolling pins I put aprons on all the kids, let them flour there work area, and gave them each a ball of dough. My grand plan was that London and Jacob would do fairly well with minimal supervision while I worked on the other side of the counter with Joseph and the big rolling pin. The minimal supervision thing went right out the window, but with a lot of help they did manage to roll out there dough to varying thicknesses and then begin cutting out the cookies.


Joseph it turned out was not too happy that I would be helping him. He thought this was going to be more like playing playdough, where you roll it out cut out some shapes and then roll it out again. He was none too patient, and while I was on the other side of the counter he started to collect all the dough back into a ball before I was able to get the cut out shapes on to a pan to bake. After that I gave him a much smaller ball of dough and just let him have fun.


As I tried to help the kids with there dough I accidentally sat my cup of flour too close to Guinevere, who insisted on still sitting on the counter, and she promptly dumped it all over herself and the counter.

After each of the children had rolled the dough out a few times I felt that dough and my nerves could not take much more, so I sent them all to wash up while I cut out the remaining cookies.

That afternoon while Guinevere was asleep I allowed the kids to decorate the cookies how ever they wanted. I only intervened here or there when the frosting was so thick that it looked like it might break the cookie, or the sprinkles so thick that you could no longer see the cookie.

London was very proud of the cookie that she decorated to look like her. Can you all see the likeness? The huge eyes, and the two green dots in her hair as rubberbands.

Overall, everyone had a good time, and I survived with my sanity. Even though the cookies do not look perfect, and some are a little thicker then others, they still taste really good. Let this be a lesson to me that perfection is not necessary. Hopefully this posting has encouraged, not discouraged, others from making sugar cookies with there young children. Happy Baking!