There is nothing like getting together with your family and spending the holidays together.
Every year, my family has a tradition that goes back almost 30 years: Cookie Day! Cookie Day takes place the Saturday after Thanksgiving and is one of my favorite days of the year. We all get together at my aunt’s house, play Christmas music and bake cookies. It’s a long day, so most of us get started before noon.
Each of the women in my family has one type of cookie that we commit to baking all day. Most of us bake the same cookie every year, but sometimes we switch it up. For the past five years, I have been making peanut butter gingerbread cookies, which I picked out because I love peanut butter. In the time it takes for my mom to make two types of cookies, I can only make one. Making the dough and waiting the hour while it’s in the fridge is the easy part, it’s the rolling of the dough and cutting the shapes that’s the hard part. Once I take one of my many trays out of the oven, I can start decorating. That might just be my favorite part of making my cookies. Over the years, I have accumulated a collection of cookie cutters so I have a lot of different Christmas shapes to work with: Santa, ornaments, snowflakes, Christmas trees, and so much more.
As for everyone else in the family, well, they’re mostly known as the tasters. They’ll come and taste our cookies and have some snacks, but in all the years I’ve been doing this, the men prefer to observe. But that’s because they enjoy sitting in the living room watching Saturday’s lineup of college football and coming back into the kitchen just in time for a taste of a freshly baked cookie.
Before I get started, I connect my phone to the loudest speaker my aunt owns and blast my Christmas music playlist. I have spent almost four years curating the best playlist, especially one that everyone can enjoy. Last year, my grandfather even played a joke on me that he knew every artist that came up on my playlist when he was actually just secretly looking at my phone.
Making cookies brings us all together and gets us in the Christmas spirit. No matter who it is, we all participate in the festivities. Even though my brother doesn’t make cookies, he usually makes up a game in the basement for all of the cousins to play. My grandfather comes in to taste the cookies, because as he always says, “I just want to make sure nothing is wrong with them.” My uncle will play his guitar as entertainment for the bakers. As for us, the cookie bakers all chat in the kitchen as we whip up our creations. At the end of the night, we take a picture in front of our cookies and exchange them so that we can indulge in each other’s hard work.