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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Cookies and Friends

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Long-standing traditions are sometimes the most fun. My friends and I started getting together during high school to bake Christmas cookies. We let it go a little while we were in college, but once we were married and had our own places we started up again.

I remember the year that the twins (pictured with Pippi in the center picture above) were six months old. I was eight months pregnant. Poor Liz did most of the work that year, as I sat to rest and Linda had to keep an eye on the babies.

When all the children were little we would let them play while we baked actual cookies - from recipes we had selected ahead of time.

We've gotten smarter as the children have gotten older - though as my friend Linda (who hosts this great event) points out - it doesn't seem like there's any less work for us now. Now we buy packaged cookie dough. Hand it out to the kids along with cookie cutters. They fill their cookie trays - and later ice and decorate the cookies by themselves. Or, in the case of the boys, glob a lot of icing on a cookie, throw some sprinkles on, and immediately eat it.

What we've learned along the way is that it isn't the cookies that are really the important part of the day (though we make sure through all our busy schedules that we manage to schedule our cookie baking day). What's important is getting together with friends and sharing a tradition - that for the kids - goes back to before they were even born.

1 comment:

Anne K said...

Looks like a lot of fun! And this year with the snow it certainly looks a lot like Xmas!