Every year, typically the first week of December, I mail out what seems like a billion Christmas cards to friends and family. I LOVE it. I look forward to it each year. I'm a huge fan of the 'snail mail' system.
I also make out Christmas cards for my kids teachers and bus drivers (and even for our mailman). Along with the Christmas cards the give to their teachers and bus drivers we always do something a little extra. This year I got a container of 101 cookie cutter shapes. A longtime friend of my family gave me her coveted sugar cookie recipe and yesterday I made a double batch of chocolate chip cookie dough and a double batch of sugar cookie dough.
This morning the kids and I rolled out sugar cookie dough and stamped Christmas cookie cutter shapes into the dough. It was a long and tiring process to say the least. After a few batches of sugar cookies John and Jessi lost interest and left the kitchen to go play. Tabytha stuck with it. After nearly 3 hours of baking sugar cookies, I told her I'd finish up them up and when they were all done she could come back to frost them and add sprinkles.
Finally, all the sugar cookies were done and I moved on to the chocolate chip cookies. Thankfully they were easy, just scoop, plop and bake. No rolling out the dough, stamping a few cookie cutters, re-rolling out the dough, stamping a few more and so on.
Somewhere in all the cookie baking "fun" I managed to get dinner prepared. Yup. I said Dinner! If you recall the beginning of the blog we started our cookie baking adventure in the Morning. I spent 7 hours in the kitchen baking cookies *sigh*. After dinner was all cleaned up I got the blank sugar cookies back out. I put some vanilla frosting in a zip top bag (a homemade pipping bag) and frosted the cookies. Tabytha went to town putting Christmas themed sprinkles on the fresh frosting and set them aside. Near the end of decorating Jessi came back and wanted to help with the sprinkles.
The cookies were FINALLY done. It felt like the day would NEVER end and there were moments in there I wanted to just be done already, BUT, all in all, it was a super fun day spent with my kids making treats for their teachers and bus drivers (and even for our mailman) to let them all know they're extra special for all they do for us each day. And, after Christmas break the kids all brought home "Thank You" cards from their teachers saying how much they enjoyed the cookies the kids made for them.
We'll definitely make some kind of treat again next year for the teachers, bus driver and mailman. If we do sugar cookies again, I'll be better prepared and make and bake them all in advance (instead of just making the cookie dough in advance) and leave the decorating part to the kids. That's the best part anyway :)
