Visions of Sugar Plums Danced in their Heads

It was like a verse from "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" this past weekend... we had visions of Sugar Plums... as we baked and baked and baked! And yes for the record one of the 18 different types of cookies that were made, were sugar plums.

It's an annual tradition stretching since before I was born (yes that's a very long time...I had to say it before you even thought it) - the ladies in the family bake Christmas Cookies.

Now this isn't just your typical baking of chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin etc.. We're talking about making the kinds of cookies that:

A.) Look beautiful on a Christmas platter
B.) That you ONLY want to make once a year (or once every few years) because they're such a pain to make.

Typically we do this the first weekend of December, but this year that happens to be weekend we decided to do Christmas for my side of the family (this year Christmas is with Dave's family). Instead we pushed the bake-fest up a week, and baked on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Here's how we started:


And how we ended up!


When I arrived at about 9am (after hitting a few Joann's stores along the way for the Cricut Cartridge Sales.. and of course Starbucks..) Grammy was already getting a head start.

Yes, she's making the crowd pleaser, chocolate covered potato chips. GG introduced those about a decade ago, and they're now an annual staple - as are spritz, and fudge - both peanut butter & chocolate.

Every year we try and come up with a few new recipes - well at least I do. Normally there's just me, Grammy & GG baking, but this year we added a "family" member - Matt's girlfriend Rana. (No there is no announcement....) We had to break her in on how we do this Christmas Cookie thing.

Poor thing thought at first we were only baking one kind of cookie.... well we showed her haha!

By the end she was ready to drop just as we wanted to. Why would that be? Just take a look for yourself at the fruits of our labor:




















Yes, that's what 18 different types of cookies, bars, fudge and candies looks like! And I think we set a new record for our holiday baking - in years past this is a morning until night (like 8pm and beyond), kind of day. This year we wrapped up before dinnertime!

I guess not having Drew underfoot makes a HUGE difference - and maybe we're finally getting the hang of this baking thing.

And thank goodness I have a year to recover from this bake-fest!