Holiday Tradition #7: Cookies

How many of my Holiday Tradition stories so far have started out with "My Grandma...." Well, here's another one.

Grandma is known for her Christmas cookies. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them, every single year. Everyone has a favorite, and every year, shortly after Thanksgiving, Grandma sets out to bake everybody's favorite cookie. And because we have something ridiculous like 29 relatives living nearby and clamoring for peanut blossoms and wreaths and chocolate mint cookies and (my personal favorite, which I hog from the cookie platter every year) spritz, she's kept busy with the baking right up until December 25.

Now, I can bake a mean cookie if I do say so myself. But, with the exception of the Holiday Season of 2006, in which I was nesting and very close to giving birth to my lovely daughter and so I baked somewhere in the vicinity of 14 different kinds of cookies, some of which have no ties to the Christmas holiday at all, and made it so nothing besides cookies could fit in our freezer for weeks afterward, I don't usually come close to the sheer volume of baked goods that my 72-year-old Grandma can generate each and every year. (One of my favorite memories of late November 2006 is waddling through Barnes and Noble with my sister Abby, who found me in the cookbook aisle yet again, perusing Martha Stewart's Christmas Cookie Collection. Abby staged her own version of a one-man Intervention and basically told me that if she wasn't able to start storing her soy products in the freezer any time soon, she'd be moving out and wouldn't I be in a world of hurt then? Who was going to roll me down the street to Dairy Queen, huh? QUIT WITH THE COOKIE BAKING ALREADY.)

This year, I have partnered with the matriarch of the family and Abby will be thrilled to hear that my house is quickly becoming Cookie Central once again.

Grandma dropped off her cookie sheets and a tub of chocolate cookie batter yesterday, which I wasted no time turning in to a batch of yummy chocolate mint cookies. And, you guys? I am not joking when I tell you that I made the best batch of spritz cookies I've ever tasted this morning. Seriously, I think it might be the cookie sheets...like some type of 1960's Teflon-coated magic. The trick--and I'm beginning to wonder why this tidbit of knowledge has been withheld from me for all these many years--is to keep your cookie sheets in the fridge between batches of the yummy little butter cookies, so the butter doesn't begin to melt before hitting the oven. They melt in your mouth and totally make all the work that goes in to cleaning the f***ing cookie press afterward worth it. Serious.

Grandma, I'll be returning your cookie sheets sometime in January.

Maybe.