Cookie Day

Hands down, my very favorite tradition every Christmas is "cookie day" with my nieces Kelly & Amy.

Our first cookie day was when Kelly was around two. I was living with my mom in Enfield at the time, and I remember her chuckling as I showed her the little, one-inch cookie cutters I had bought...all the better for two-year-old fingers, I thought. Hours - and what seemed like 300 tiny cookies later - I quickly decided the following year we'd use the very largest cookie cutters I could find!!

Amy joined us when she was old enough, and we have spent literally hours measuring, creaming, rolling, cutting, cooling, and decorating. And eating! And laughing and talking and singing Christmas carols along with the radio, and playing UNO while the cookies baked.

When we started, I had to pull kitchen chairs up to the counter so they could reach. I did the measuring and they did the dumping. Then, while Kelly rolled and cut out, Amy and I sliced the refrigerated sugar rolls.

Now they bake and I sit and visit.

Eventually we moved on to gingerbread houses. Kel's would look like something out of Better Homes and Gardens - laden with icing and candy, all precisely placed, almost always with a snowman or kid playing in the yard. Amy's and mine would look like Hurrican Katrina casualties...or something out of the Wizard of Oz. She and I then joined forces on one house - and did even worse.

We never truly conquered the rock-hard icing that came with kits, and well into April I found myself scraping errant bits of plaster-like icing from any flat surface in the dining room.

Last year, we gave up on gingerbread.

This year, we had a guest for the first time - Kelly's friend Austin is here from Arizona and joined us. To be honest, I worried a little that having someone else with us would somehow change cookie day, and it did - for the better. To share something that means so much to the three of us with someone Kelly cares about made the day even more special.

Christmas would not be Christmas without cookie day. How fortunate and blessed I am to have it, and Kelly & Amy. They are Christmas to me.