Cookies

I love cookies. I love baking them. I love decorating them. I love trying new recipes. I love eating them. Cookies. The smell of freshly baked cookies is one of the most fantastic smells to me. Especially around Christmas, it's what I like to call Cookie Season. Oh! The varieties and flavors of all the cookies we've made over the years; choosing which ones to make next year, which ones will be a "favorite" or a "regular."

This year may be different. After the move, I will have 3 days to bake cookies before Christmas. I suppose I could bake some AFTER Christmas, but then, are they still Christmas cookies? Are they as good for New Years? I'm not sure. I've made chocolate chip cookies a few times, but none so far as to be called Christmas cookies. In those 3 short days, which recipes will jump to the top of the stack? Which cookies will be worthy of making, in absence of all the rest? Macaroons, with their sweet, sticky coconut bodies topped with a bit of maraschino cherry? Peanut butter blossoms, half-melted Hershey kisses pressed into warm, sugar-coated peanut butter rounds? Magic mints, their peppermint combining with the chocolate ever so perfectly, their tops crackled with powdered sugar? Fruitcake cookies, for those who shun the real fruitcake, these will make you change your mind? Scotch-a-roos, those elusive cookies so good we haven't ever tasted them yet? My famous sugar cookies, cut into so many festive designs, splashed with colorful, simple frosting?

I wish I could make them all, but today I'm baking up the rest of the gingerbread dough I made last week. It was my first shot at gingerbread. It's mighty tasty, but not as soft and poofy as I imagine really awesome gingerbread cookies to be. They look all poofy in the oven, and as soon as I pull them out, they go flat. Like a souffle. Delicious, thick, chewy cookies fresh out of the oven are, in seconds, demoted to flat, indistinguishable blobs, for not only have they caved in, they've spread. My meticulously cut gingerbread men could not hold their shape. Lop-sided 5-petaled flowers emerge instead of little boy cut-outs waiting to be dressed up in frosting and candy.

Despite their shape and lack of thickness, they are delicious. And chewy. I suppose I should be grateful that they didn't burn, or are otherwise inedible. I shall cast aside all my cookie cares and worries and bask in the satisfaction that something I've made brings smiles and sighs of delight to my family and friends. A toast, then, to Cookies!