after the sugar settles...

Did we ever bake AND decorate this weekend! We whipped up our usual holiday Double Chocolate Delights (kind of like homemade oreos with peppermint icing), molasses cookies, and the traditional decorated sugar cookies that we cut out with cookie cutters. In addition to all this sweetness overload, I made loaves and loaves of cranberry bread. If you are wondering about the white streak on my son's nose...since the kids where little, I have always told them that a sign of a real baker is to have a flour on your nose. I would always take my finger and dot their noses with a touch of flour from the rolling pin. Before we started cutting out the cookies this year, Kyle requested his traditional dousing of flour, which made me happy to know that he is still young enough to enjoy this little thing we do.

I am also happy to report that, unlike previous years, the kitchen mess was not catastrophic, and we weren't all crunching around on colored sugar or sliding around on flour that had sifted to the floor. I attribute this to Sinbad, my new Hoover dog. He was on duty cleaning the floor through out the entire process. Later we set up the tree with minimal problems. It took us about twenty minutes to remember how the pieces of the tree went together and plug the thing in. For years we used to get fresh trees, but last year gave up and got ourselves a dandy pre-lite, stress free tree, that is stress free as long as you remember how all the pieces go together.

Now the biggest irony of the season...now that I have made all these cookies, the challenge, of course, is trying not to eat them.