Christmas Cookies!

Christmas cookies are a MUST every year for several reasons:
1. It's a great tradition to do every year with the kiddos
2. Who doesn't LOVE cookies... especially butter cut-out cookies!
3. It makes Dan absolutely crazy and stressed out (and I get so many laughs out of this - I love it!)

So, this year we decided to make the butter cut-out cookies, the colorful kaleidoscope cookies, and gingerbread cookies.

Well, I must be getting old... because we only got to baking the butter cut-out cookies on our first cookie night. The kids had a ball. Highlights included
* Giuls being covered in flour
* daddy getting stressed with kids getting flour everywhere
* daddy getting stressed with kids sneaking and eating the dough (Giuls was the worst, grabbing chunks of dough at every chance and stuffing them in her mouth!)
* Rocco taking the cookie decorating very seriously... and then at the end, he ended up dumping a pile of brown decorations all over one cookie
* Gabby spending more time eating the red-hot candies than decorating her tray of cookies (she was the last to finish)
* Giuliana really enjoyed putting sprinkles on the cookies and took to the task much faster than I expected her to. She too ended up dumping an entire bottle of sprinkles on one cookie though... but hers were different colored flour shapes.

The next night I made one batch of the kaleidoscope cookies (the green/mint), one batch of the white/almond and I ended up burning the red/peppermint batch. Good times. Then, when I started to melt the chocolate to frost all the cookies with, I think I overcooked the chocolate too.

I ended up throwing out the gingerbread cookie dough because we had mountains of cookies sitting around already... and well, I didn't want to food poison anyone (yes, I totally forgot I had left the dough out for an entire day because I kept getting distracted by kids and work and life in general). Great excuse to not create anymore temptations though!

Our au pair, Michalina, even made a batch of her grandma's butter cookies with a lemon/egg white/powdered sugar frosting. They were also delicious!

And now... it's time to lay OFF the cookies! :))