Family Christmas Cookie Traditions and Recipes

Christmas cookies are a tradition in my family. When I was nine, my maternal grandmother moved from Miami, Florida, to Georgia, bringing the tradition of baking cookies for every holiday. She has baked cookies for the Fourth of July, Autumn, and Christmas, to name a few. Because she lived close by when she moved to Georgia, we only started the cookie-baking and decorating tradition once she lived closer. The process would begin with choosing what kind of dough we want to use. The options were always gingerbread or sugar cookie dough. She and I had the same conversation every year regarding selecting the dough I tried to use. As a child, I liked eating sugar cookies better than gingerbread ones, but she always reminded me that gingerbread cookies were more manageable to decorate and generally more durable. Despite this reminder, I would still choose the sugar cookie dough. She was always gracious enough to make the dough beforehand and chill it in the fridge until we were ready to roll it out. Before rolling out the dough, we would select the cookie cutters I wanted. There were always so many beautiful options.
There were reindeer, Santa hats, snowmen, Christmas trees, angels, bells, and more. I tended to go for the larger cookie cutters like the Santa hats and Christmas trees. Once we had rolled out the dough twice and cut the cookies from the dough, the dough would need to chill in the fridge. While that was happening, the first batch of cookies would go into the oven. It was always a careful dance with the sugar cookies because grandma would want them to start turning brown on the edges before we would take them out, but there was a fine line between that and the cookies starting to burn. While the cookies were baking and cooling, we would begin mixing the colors of frosting we would need for decorating. The standard colors for cooking and decorating with grandma would be blue, green, red, yellow, and white. We didn’t use all of these colors every time, but I remember all of these being used at some point. Once the first batch of cookies came out and while they were cooling, we would roll out the second batch.
The decorating portion of the cookie baking and decorating took the longest. I can remember putting individual sprinkles on the cookies with tweezers. The snowmen would have perfectly placed buttons, and orange sprinkles served as the carrot noses. There were also red sprinkles that served as the scarves. In retrospect, I don’t think I would use the tweezers to place individual sprinkles on the cookies. As a child, I wanted to do things the correct way. My grandmother used tweezers when making cookies, so that’s how we did it growing up. Now that I’m an adult, I keep it more straightforward when I bake Christmas cookies. I cook circular sugar cookies and frost them. After I frost them, I might put on sprinkles, but that is the extent. I’ve also added more items to my Christmas baking repertoire. I try to make chocolate-covered pretzels and last year; I made fudge. I’d like to hear about your favorite holiday recipes and/or traditional foods.