The FIRST Day of our Christmas

The twelve days of OUR Christmas start today :) My son will be traveling to see his father for Christmas Day so I made a call to Santa and asked him to stop by a few days early. Luckily for my kids, I was always a great client of Santa's back in the day and he was beyond willing to oblige with a trip to our house on the night of December 21.

On the FIRST day of our Christmas, the gift I gave we gave our kids was: COOKIE MAKING MEMORIES!

 

Christmas cookie making is a long standing tradition in our family. I remember being a small 5 year old girl standing on a dining room chair in the kitchen of my grandmother as she expertly made dough and rolled it out to the perfect thickness. She had what felt like a hundred cookie cutters waiting for us, all destined for greatness one adorned with colored icing, sprinkles, red hot candies, and little silver balls.

The kitchen was full of bags of flour, sugar, and mixing bowls all put to good use. The stove was crowded with pots and pans full of candies and chocolate mixtures in the making. It smelled amazing and looked like the single most important duty for the holidays to the eyes of an enchanted five year old. My grandma was the most amazing baker I had seen. I'm pretty sure she had most of those recipes memorized, a fact that hurts now that I do not have copies of them all to pass on. She knew what to do, how to fix "mistakes", and exactly when to take cookies out of the oven at the moment they reach perfection. More than 25 years later, I am still working on that skill. Maybe it's something only a grandmother can do.

I am not a grandmother, although I feel that old some days! I am a mother longing to create memories with my children and family that will live on fondly in their hearts even once I am gone. Just like my warm memories of Grandma Cocoa's baking days.

My son is not interested in the baking aspect and my daughter a little young still (but I have hope for her!) so the rolling, cutting, and baking of the cookies fell on my shoulders. Turning on the Christmas music and starting at my task I was taken back to that brown and blue kitchen I loved back in 1985. I do not have the hundreds of cookie cutters Grandma Cocoa did but I have a few and my kids chose two that they'd like to decorate; gingerbread men and Christmas trees, two of my favorites.

I like to think they both inherited her amazing cookie skills and made some memories of hanging out with their parents around the holidays. Their parents definitely cherished the time.