It’s Cookie Time

My friends Janet and Bob have a great tradition they share with their kids and their grandkids.  Every year at Christmas, they bake a ton of cookies to give to their teachers, girl scout/boy scout leaders, and everyone else who is a part of their community.  For the past few years, Larry and I have been a part of this tradition as well.  It is always so much fun.  Janet and Bob have an exchange student from Israel who is staying with them this year.  This was Nadeen’s first time experiencing this fun Townley Family holiday tradition too.

Everyone is buried behind a wall of cookies.  We did not decorate these cookies.  They were baked and ready to be boxed up for their lucky recipients.

Brian is proudly displaying his favorite cookies, the peanut butter cookies with Reese’s peanut butter cups.

Nadeen is sampling the chocolate covered pretzels.  I think she likes them.

Janet calls these her “6-hour” cookies.  They are chocolate shortbread cookies dipped in both white and dark chocolate.  They are so good.

Let’s let the decorating begin.  Part of the tradition is to have all the generations help make the frosting for the cookies.  This year, Nadeen is part of the whole process too.

Once the frosting is made, it needs to be colored.  This year our colors were, red (dark pink), light pink, green, blue, yellow, orange and a dark purple.

Emily and Nadeen are the mix masters of color.

So many different decorations from which to choose.  Oh, but what fun it is to play with all these cool and different goodies.  Every year, Janet’s inventory grows by leaps and bounds.

At last, the cookie decorating begins.  All these cookies will soon be decorated.  We all followed our wild imaginations, and came up with some pretty amazing decorative cookies.

Nadeen is proudly displaying her first cookie of the season.

The cookie masters are hard at work.

Here is a small sampling of our cookie creativity.

Every year, we all get one ugly sweater to decorate.  The goal is to make it as ugly as you can, using the decorative leftovers from previous cookies.  Somehow Emily did two cookies this year.  Are either of these sweaters the “ugliest”?  Stay tuned.

This year’s nominees for ugliest sweater.  And the winner is …..

Me.  My sweater was the ugliest this year.  That’s what purple and yellow stripes mixed with 2 red hot cinnamon drops will do for you.  🙂

The cookies are all baked and decorated and are now ready to be boxed up and delivered to their lucky recipients.  Brian, Shelly, Peter and Emily are all taking a cookie break before the cookie boxing begins.

Thank you Janet, Bob, Brian, Shelly, Peter, Emily and Nadeen for always letting us join in on the fun and the family tradition.  It is an event we look forward to every year.  All hail the cookie!