Carrying On

Every year since my boys were very little, my mother baked Christmas cookies with them. It was one of our favorite Christmas traditions. She would make the dough ahead of time (compulsively organized person that she was, she always made the dough the day after Thanksgiving and then froze it). On the baking day, she would come armed with dough, aprons, and enormous rolling pin. Under her supervision, the boys would roll out the dough to her prescribed thickness and cut out dozens of cookies with our wonderful assortment of cookie cutters. Then after she baked them for us , the decorating extravaganza would begin.

This is the first year we don't have my mother with us. I thought we'd skip the cookie baking this year - too sad to do it without her. But the boys wanted to do it. So yesterday we did. And it wasn't sad. It was wonderful, every minute of it. How could I have thought it would be sad?

Here are some of our cookies, made with so many memories, and with so much love.