Cookies!

Holiday Traditions Part 2

One of the most popular holiday traditions, and my personal favorite, is the baking and decorating of Christmas cookies. Each year during the holiday season millions of families bake Christmas cookies to enjoy and share with family and friends, and with Santa, of course. 

On Christmas Eve each year, Santa visits over 500 million homes where children leave him about a billion cookies. Even if he takes but one bite of each cookie, it would calculate to a total of about 168,075,193 cookies. Let's not even try to calculate the calories! 

Historians say that leaving cookies and milk out for Santa Claus wasn't done in the United States until the 1930s. It is believed that it was something parents during the economic depression of the early 30’s encouraged their children to do in order to teach them how to share and be charitable in hard times. The practice remains to this day.  No wonder modern images of Santa show him as quite a bit “fuller” than earlier images.

When we were raising our children, our annual family cookie event involved the adults baking the cookies and the kids showing up for the decorating part. The kitchen table would be set with several plates stacked with “naked” cookies in the shapes of stars, stockings, Santa, Christmas trees, wreaths, snowflakes, gingerbread men, reindeer and sleighs. Bowls of colored frosting in red, green, yellow, blue, purple, pink and any color someone insisted they needed to complete their envisioned cookie masterpiece, were set out along with icing bags and various tips to accommodate our cookie artists. Sprinkles, jimmies and doodads were also available for use during our family's creative cookie decorating sessions.

The girls all took their decorating seriously (at least for the first hour or so). Our son, on the other hand, usually made it through about four cookies in his intense attempt to create prettier cookies than his sisters before he got tired of it all and instead mixed all of the frosting colors together in one bowl thus creating a lovely Army olive drab green. We always would inevitably end up with a bunch of Army reindeer, Army gingerbread men and Army Santa Clauses.  

As he would always explain, “They all taste good whether they are frosted in red, blue, yellow or Army green.” I guess he was right.  There were never any left over.