When I was four years old my family moved to a new house. It was a nicer house - more bedrooms and a bigger back yard. My mom liked the attached garage. But the best thing about the house was the people who lived next door. A husband and wife, Harold and Helen, and two daughters, Barb and Deb, and Grandpa. They became our second family.
They had a tradition. Each year Helen and her daughters would bake Christmas cookies with Helen's sister Clara and her daughters (there actually may have been other family members involved but I don't remember - it was a crowd though.) Everyone would make up batches of cookie dough in advance and they would spend the day in Helen's kitchen baking and decorating. And they invited us to help. Then on Christmas Eve, after we finished with our family festivities, we'd come home and head next door where Helen would be serving the cookies with a cocktail for the adults and kiddie cocktails for the rest of us.
It was a lot of fun. Baking cookies is about the only kitchen activity that I actually enjoy. And to this day I much prefer to do it with other people rather than just by myself. So today my mom and dad and my sister and I got together to bake cookies. Actually my sister and I baked, my dad cleaned up after us and my mom kept the dog out of our way.
Here's pictures (we didn't do any decorated cookies this year, although we left the gingerbread men dough in the refrigerator so that my other sister can help bake them when she gets here):
My sister's teaspoons.
mixing things up
Russian Wedding Cookies (or, as we call them, snowballs) being rolled in powder sugar:
Some of the oatmeal raisin cookies, cooling:
Brown Sugar cookies
I have to confess, I think the last two pictures were taken by my sister on my camera, she's much more picture-oriented than I am.
And here is Truman - licking every crumb out of the empty bag of dog food before it gets thrown away:
