I made a bunch of Christmas Cookies this weekend. Nowhere near as many as Margaret and I made when we first started dating. But more than we made last year (which I remember as being a pretty light year). And I don’t think we are done yet. We’ve done:

• Snikerdoodles
• Press Cookies
• Peanut Butter cookies with Kisses

Press Cookies always make me think of Christmas, since that is the only time of year my family ever brought out the cookie press to press the cookies. And then we would get together as a family and put jimmies and sprinkles on them to decorate them before placing in the oven. Even my father got into the decorating act. His favorite: Chocolate jimmies. If you put enough of them on, it gives the cookie a chocolate flavor as well.

I remember back in High School my friend Bruce decided to make Snickerdoodles for our German class. Whatever recipe he found, it took like 8 sticks of butter and they turned out as the heaviest cookies I’ve ever had. The recipe I follow uses shortening and the cookies usually come out quite light.

We still have a few more kinds of cookies we plan on making this year. Shortbread cookies, Sugar Cookies, maybe Gingerbread men, possibly Chocolate Chip. There is no way we are doing Oatmeal Scotchies this year. I’ve been trying for at least 3 years, and have never gotten a batch to turn out correctly. My mother has quite making them as well, for much the same reason. Oh, and we’ll probably do a batch of School Cookies for my Father-in-law when he comes for New Years. There are quite a few cookies that we won’t be making this year because they are just too hard and we don’t have the time. Things like snowballs, klotchkies (which I am sure I didn’t even come close to spelling right), nut cups, etc.

Our full list of Christmas cookies is a delightful mix of the cookies from my childhood and from my wife’s. The best part is that we both have favorites that the other brought to the relationship (I love the shortbread cookies). A few years back my mother gave me a floppy disk with all her Christmas cookie recipes on it. We have used that disk every year. And every year it gets harder and harder to find a computer with a floppy drive to read it. We have an unbelievable 8 computers in our house, and only 2 of them have floppy drives. But now the recipe list is on my laptop where it will stay until next year.