Sugar Cookie Tradition

It's been an informal tradition to bake and decorate sugar cookies for Cmas. It probably started with my mother when I was in grade school. The sugar cookies and frosting came out at holiday time, so I associated it with the holidays. The last few years my sister has carried on the tradition at home, and I gladly volunteer to help her . . . eat the cookie dough and cookies. I do decorate, too, but my decorating usually consists of seeing how much frosting I can load onto each cookie, because that's the way I like to eat them.

This year and the last two, I've been cementing the sugar cookie making into an annual tradition passing it on to others.

December 2008
I was working in residential drug/alcohol rehab for teens and made sugar cookies with the two residents who were left at the facility when all the others went home due to the Great Ice Storm. They really seemed to enjoy the project, though one of them sneaked a smoke out back when I thought she was washing dishes. They gladly shared the cookies with the adult residents of the program.

December 2009
I made cookies with my first community-based client in my next job. His mother actually mixed the dough and bought frosting, so we just did the fun part--decorating. He was not normally a motivated fellow, but he went to town at decorating the cookies. He was looking forward to sharing them with his classmates the next day. My appetite for the cookies was diminished by the little brother taking licks from miscellaneous cookies. Before long, I couldn't keep track of which were contaminated and which were not. My client was in such a jolly mood after decorating that he even did the dishes!

December 2010
I invited a dozen or two local lady friends over to share the tradition of decorating cookies, and a dozen showed. One of my housemates actually baked all of the cookies for me, and another housemate made hot tea, so I just made the frosting and accompanying punch. We had no idea how the ladies would respond to the idea of them preparing their own food--a novel concept in a hospitality-based culture--but they pitched right in! One of them started to do intricate designs that blew me away . . . until I remembered that she is a henna expert (the same one who did my feet a couple of months back). Of course she would be artistic. We decorated all of the cookies Hannah had made and had piles of them on plates for the ladies to take home and share with their families! One girl kept saying, "I didn't know if I wanted to come, but this is such a nice tradition."

Who would have guessed that my mother baking sugar cookies at Cmas would translate into a tradition passed across the generations and across the miles?!  But that's how Cmas works, too--it's not just for one place, one time, one group of people . . . It's message is for everyone--everyone can participate, and everyone receives.