One of my favorite childhood memories was helping my mother make dozens and dozens of Christmas cookies. This was done over the course of many nights when one of the annual Christmas specials was on Back in the days before, TiVo, DVDs, and yes even VCRs, if you wanted to see Merry Christmas Charlie Brown or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you had to wait all year until it was shown – once, and you didn’t dare go to the bathroom until a commercial was on because there was no ‘pause’. I loved it when baking night fell on the same night as one of those cherished specials.

My mother, being Italian, always cooked (and in this case baked) to serve a crowd, usually a very hungry crowd. So it was not uncommon for her to increase the size of the recipe by 8X, yes that’s right 8X. If the recipe produced 2dozen cookies, we made 16 dozen. Add to that the fact that sehe usually baked 4 or 5 different types of cookies, and you’d think we were starting our own business. Even though we had the family over for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (nothing was better than Mom’s Lasagna), we were still left with enough cookies to enjoy well into March.

Every cookie was made as perfectly as possible, from the shape of the Almond Crescents to the branches on the Butter Cookie Christmas Trees. Once baked and cooled, all the cookies were stored in round, aluminum foil lined, tins and stacked in the den. We worked and worked while the much loved Christmas specials played in the background. Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of work over several evenings, and Mom wasn’t always in the best of moods, but it was something to look forward to.

So every year, when those chilly New York December days rolled around again, my mother would buy pounds and pounds of butter, then break out the hand-cranked cookie cutter and we’d get start rolling, shaping, and decorating our way into another Christmas season. And now, since my own children are old enough to start helping, I get to do it all over – with them!

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