Memories of Christmas Cookies, part of a series. Yesterday: Holiday Cookies with the Z Girls.

By the time I was in high school, we were probably producing 10-15 types of cookies and candies: double, triple, quadruple batches each time. We’d start before Thanksgiving, freezing the heartier types like thumbprint cookies and chocolate crinkles. Every weekend we’d cook from early morning until late in the evening, cooling cookies on every surface, the oven in constant use, a pile of broken and burnt cookie catastrophes on the counter for passersby. We even cooled cookies on the pages of the cookbooks – the butter stains are still there.

I suppose you could say we specialized in sandies, the shortbread cookies that we made by the hundreds. I didn’t like them very much, but the dough was great – sugar and flour and real butter. Sometimes Sarah and I would make and eat just the dough as a treat after school when it wasn’t cookie season. After sandies, I probably loved making chocolate crinkles the most. They were dark chocolate cookies that we rolled in confectioners’ sugar before baking. They crackled as they spread, leaving a snowflake pattern on the surface of the cookies.

The sugar cookies were the most tedious to make, but we couldn’t help ourselves. What’s a bag of holiday cookies without brightly painted reindeer, bells and ornaments? We’d make a glaze out of confectioners’ sugar, milk and food coloring, and use cheap little paintbrushes to decorate. We used the same cookie cutters each year, and I remember a Santa Claus in profile that looked like a humpback man if we didn’t paint him right. We wanted so much for our cookies to look like the ones in the magazines, but they always came out pretty homespun-looking. In retrospect, I bet they were beautiful.

We tried a couple of new cookies every year. Early on, before we learned that anise=licorice (yuck!), we tried anise stars, and Papa was the only one who would eat them. We always wanted to make those fancy jelly-filled cookies with intricate cutouts, but they usually fell apart or puffed up too much. The stained glass cookies, where you created this little cookie outline and filled the middle with crushed Life Savers candies, were always a disaster! The candies always melted out under the cookie outline, and they usually burned into a black caramel on the cookie sheet. Papa still ate the broken pieces with the caramelized Life Savers, though. He’d eat anything.

There was kind of a controversy around fudge. We always wanted to make the real-deal fudge with the candy thermometer, but we usually ran out of time and just made the easy kind with marshmallow fluff. I always felt like that was cheating.

We also loved making the shortbread because Mom and her father (Bampa) loved it so much. Again, I didn’t really see the appeal, but I liked the look of thin shortbread pie slices, which we’d sometimes dip in chocolate. Shortbread was so easy to make, and I loved seeing Bampa take a delicate slice in his big fingers before he grunted in appreciation. We all loved to see Bampa smile.

What were your favorite holiday cookies? Have your tastes changed? What cookies can your family never be without?

• ‹ Christmas Cookies – The Early Days
• Holiday Cookies with the Z Girls ›