Christmas Cookie Monster

One of my favorite times of the year is Christmas.  It's a wonderful opportunity to spend time with family and friends, celebrate the birth of Christ (if you're Christian), and to just generally be thankful for everything you have.  In addition to all of that good stuff, I also love making and eating all the sweets that come with that time of year, particularly cookies.

Most likely an inherited trait, I have a MASSIVE sweet tooth.  I practically require sugary stuff on a very regular basis.  Cookies, candy, pie, cake, brownies, blah blah blah all of the above.  My mom is also this way, so we enable each others' sugar addictions around Christmas by making loads of Christmas cookies.  One might say this is a tradition of ours.  It's especially easy now that my husband and I live so close to my parents.

Every year, there's a list of several types of cookies that we'll go through, choosing 3 or 4 to make a few dozen.  This year, we got together over a couple of weekends and made sandwich cookies, candy cane cookies, spritz, and toffee (not a cookie, but a must-have Christmas sweet).  Separate from that, my mom also made cinnamon sticks.  I didn't take photos of everything, but here are a couple from the baking extravaganza.

Spritz Cookies

Candy Cane Cookies

COOKIESSSSS!!!!