much the same as my stress making of pies for thanksgiving, i attempted to bring all the holiday joy by baking a million cookies. i kicked things off with some old favorites from over the years, plus some hits from last year.
seven layer magic bars. always a hit. 
turtle thumbprint cookies. 
cranberry orange pinwheel. 
finished pinwheels.
i made up the cut out sugar cookie dough (regular AND gluten free!) and some gingerbread dough. i baked up the gingerbreads without any help from children, because they don’t love the dough and doing all the same shape gets boring. or so i’m told.
i even made a few keto cookies for myself. my hope was that if i had my own option for sweet treats laying around, i would be less likely to have an epic binge on all of the tempting cookies i was making for everyone else. i made a keto version of seven layer magic bars (i made my own keto sweetened condensed milk and added lily’s salted caramel chips and they were soooo good. also. not shown). i also turned my meatball cookie recipe into a keto version. i didn’t bother with the actual version this year since no one really loved them. the keto version was almost just as good and i’m pretty happy with the results. finally, i made a giant batch of cranberry pistachio cookies, and then topped them with some white chocolate. also very tasty. and i can report that they did help me in my quest to remain keto from thanksgiving through christmas, the hardest part of the year to stick to a diet.
keto meatball cookies. 
cranberry pistachio cookies.
of course we had to have an epic christmas cookie decorating party for all of the cut out cookies, the cutting out of which i managed to not take any photos of. i busted out all of my christmas sprinkles, made up the requested colors of icing, both cookie and buttercream, and we got started.
i don’t know why but the kids weren’t super into it this year. i also took note at the changing topics of conversation as they roll into teen and tween hood. (i’ll spare you the details). after isaac finished his batch of gluten free cookies, the girls abandoned me and gave me their undecorated cookies, and i was left finishing up and cleaning up by myself. suddenly excessive cookie baking didn’t seem to be the answer to creating holiday joy.
in any case, we ended up with these beautiful works of art. the top left piece of parchment paper are isaac’s gluten free cookies (some decorated by me so i could be sure they were shareable with strangers). the rest are creations by the girls and me. mostly me. quitters.
in case you were wondering what the aftermath of our cookie decorating tends to look like, i remembered to capture a shot this year. and since the decorating of the sugar cookies ended abruptly, i went ahead and decoratied the gingerbread cookies, but kept it with simple with just royal icing and red hots.
i made a few more cookies that went undocumented during the baking process. there were a lot of chocolate snickerdoodles. i made one recipe that didn’t flatten out, so i found another and then dropped a whole pan of them and almost cried. but the third batch, perfection. i also made some gooey butter cookies that used cake mix in the recipe. i thought they would be super fun and easy for the girls, but alas, they didn’t want to help and i made them myself. i may or may not have even picked all the christmas tree nonpareils out of a sprinkle mix i had, to give myself enough jimmies for the recipe, since they were nowhere to be found in all of winston-salem.
anyhooo. our family was responsible for providing the christmas cookie platter for the grandlidbom’s open garage, masked and socially distant, swedish christmas this year. so. i made two. one regular plater and one gluten free and keto platter.
regular delicious sugary and flour-y. 
gluten free in the back. keto in the front.
after our swedish christmas cookie were sent home with various party goers, and after i made all of my deliveries of cookies to local friends, we were low on sugar cookies. also, one of my friends who is deep in the process of moving asked if she could come over to decorate cookies with her fam. so for the first time in the history of my life, i made a second batch of christmas rollout sugar cookies. i actually ordered a bunch more cutters that i had hoped would arrive on time, but they came on 12/26 because of course they did. so, we settled for the same old shapes, and started up round two.
this time around, i had one helper in the cut-out process and i remembered to take a photo. i even took two!
and then i forgot to take pics while we decorated all the cookies, except for literally one of hazel. next year i’ll get it right.
we were pretty happy with our results. the kids stuck with it this time. well the girls anyways. it maybe had something to do with the fact that we were decorating with friends. or maybe it was because i wasn’t being so obsessed with keeping them saliva free. either way, a successful round two in the books.
of course, when sugar cookies are being made, a josh allen likeness has to be created. i made one last year, and then a zombie version at halloween. this year was no exception. in our first batch of sugar cookies, a new josh allen was born, but for our second batch, i decided to use an angel cookie to depict breakout wide receiver stephon diggs. of course i didn’t let anyone eat them and they resided on the window sill in the kitchen until gameday monday night (when they obliterated the fallen evil empire patriots).
in the order i placed for more cookie cutters, i added a few non-christmas themed shapes, so there’s a slight chance we will be making more cookies before next fall and winter. stay tuned. (there’s a unicorn!!)
I love how you really get into this annual event! And the cookies look (and taste) wonderful!