Baking Christmas Cookies 101

Every year, Sweetie asks me to bake a bunch of cookies to give to our customers. It's something that the previous owner of our company did and, well, I guess it's tradition.

So yesterday I braved the Walmart and got all the basics. And today, I woke up early, pulled on my big stretchy black sweat pants, added a red top, slipped on my Easy Spirit tennies and donned my Christmas apron. It's all about the outfit.

It helps that it's totally freezin' outside and rainy. I started the oven to heatin' and turned on the stereo for some Bing, Frank, and Martin to serenade me some Christmas tunes.

I hadd 2 cups of coffee to get me through the first two batches, then I move onto the hard stuff, a glass of milk. I always start to feel sick at about the half-way point and start intensely drowning myself in water. My theory is that if you drink a bunch of water while you're eating...er...I mean samplin' cookies, then the calories won't stick to your butt. Don't look at my butt as an example, I'm not the best test case scenario.


Recipes stacked up, ready to choose and follow. Some new, some old.


You'll need all your baking tubs out with the basics within easy reach.


You'll HAVE to have one of these babies, this one was my grandmother's....it's wanting to quit on me, but I won't let it. Just this morning I had Calvin take it out to the garage and make some tweeks on it, it's working perfectly now, thank you very much.


You'll want to fill your sink with hot sudsy water. Makes for easy clean up.


Make your stations; one for cookie sheet loading.


And one for cookie sheet cooling.

You'll need plenty of taste testers, I just happen to have three willing victims, that are brutally honest. Sorry I have no pictures of them, as they were sneaky about their testing and I couldn't catch them until all that was left was crumbs on their chins.

And then you'll have to have a Sweetie that loves you to bring you some good food for lunch, so you won't just eat sweets all day.

Somewhere between the 7th and 8th batch, you'll need to go collapse in bed for awhile and hold some smelling salts over your nose. That's me today, sometime before lunch everything kinda went south and I ended up in bed for the remainder of the day. Nice.

But in the end, it will all be worth it. I don't make anything too difficult or fancy, just scrumptious. I'll have to work hard this year so there will be something left for Santa and his reindeer, last year he got stale wheat thins and some very questionable egg nog. Ugh, don't even say 'egg nog' right now, my gut can't take it.