Cookies!

Every year, I kind of let something slide.

This year, I managed to pull of Christmas cards (well, to my aged relatives, anyways - yours may or may not be in the mail by the end of this week), but by the time Christmas Day rolled around, I realized I had not made a single solitary Christmas cookie.

Boxing day, Kelly mentions that there weren't a lot of cookies (we had some, as I had two friends come over with cookie tins full of nut-filled toxic-to-me goodies that the rest of the family has been enjoying, and Ken and Kelly went to a cookie baking extravaganza at the house of one of his colleagues). I had turned up a Christmas Cookie magazine while I was clearing out Skip's room earlier that day, and so I said "hey! Would you like to make cookies?"

(This served a double purpose, as I'd just gotten an email from church saying "We're having a cookie social tomorrow morning, so if you have any LEFT OVER cookies, could you bring them?" and I had no leftovers, but I could fake it, right?)

I figure, hey, it's the second day of Christmas... if we're celebrating Orthodox Christmas, I've still got 10 days left to get my act together, right?

Last year, I'd scored this great Wilton cast-aluminum cookie press on the clearance rack at a fancy-pants grocery store. I had never taken it out of the box, and it was about time.

Kelly was giddy with glee!

And even though the recipe book said "Don't worry if your first attempts fail. With practice you will get better", Kelly didn't make a bad cookie all afternoon.

Her favorites were the Christmas Trees...

But she made sure to test out every attachment of the press (and I discovered why it was on such a huge mark-down - there was no instruction manual, and one of the pieces in the handle assembly had been put on upside-down. But I watched a lot of MacGuyver in my youth, so was able to fix it! Boo-yeah)

By the end of the afternoon, she'd made 8 cookie sheets of little perfect cookies. That's almost 16 dozen cookies (not including all the dough that we may-or-may-not-have eaten) I was sure that a hundred and fifty little buttery cookies would be a wonderful addition to the assortment the following morning at church.

Kelly's last tray of cookies was to test out the final attachment. It sort of looked like a bow tie, or maybe a propeller. She squirted out a pan-full of cookies, and then said "I'm going to decorate these with silver balls. I'll put one on each side of the bow tie!"

Alas, the cookies sort of spread out a bit while baking.

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Is it just me...?

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What do you see...?

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Do you think the church ladies would notice? Maybe they'd enjoy the festive silver pasties?