Fancy decorated cookies at Christmas are a given.  They can be found in stores and bakeries and even online.  Good friends give them as gifts and others share them in cookie swaps.  Our family is no different and we bake batches of them each year.  Mainly, we share them with family and a few special friends.  One family tradition we have is for our girls to decorate a batch of sugar cookies to give as a gift to their cousins each year.   Truth be told, they go out of their way to make them the craziest, most outrageous and quite honestly, the ugliest cookies a trio of boys (“the cousins”) have ever seen.  After dinner when dessert is on the table, many laughs are shared and many cookies are consumed.

Now that we are in Virginia, our tradition of sharing them on Christmas day will not be possible.  We will have to send them on to the boys via the post office and they will not arrive until after Christmas.  Even so, all is not lost!  Having a fair amount of time at home this holiday season, I was able to decorate a batch of gingerbread cookies to send out in time for the family Christmas dinner in Kentucky. 
This was the first time in a very long time that I had the time to give cookies any real thought.  In the end, I chose some of my favorite cutters and let my inner Martha loose in the kitchen.  Many batches of royal icing were whipped up and with my bottles of gel colors, I mixed up a rainbow of icing paints.  After digging through my equipment, I found all of my couplers and tips and I got to work.  The little nonpareils and white pearls just added to the fun and I was quite content to spend my day decorating cookies.

One thing I generally avoid, anything with faces.  While I can mix up colors and frost cookies all day, faces are not something I like to do; my skills just aren’t that good.  At least until now, these gnomes were pretty easy to make and while they aren’t very lifelike, they are really cute!

All nestled in one of my vintage tins from the thrift store

And since I was taking the photos with the tree as my background, here are a couple of my favorite ornaments.  My collection has many glass ornaments, quite a few have been hanging on our tree for 30 years.  For years, I have collected food ornaments and if you look at our tree, it is not unusual to find things like a head of garlic, a broccoli stalk or a can of soup hanging along with pretty glass globes.  One of my favorite types of ornaments are the ones that slip over the lights and glow.  This crazy one is a lighthouse and it is covered with glitter.

This little bisque bird is a creamy white but it takes on whatever color the light is.  This year, it is glowing yellow and I like the way it looks; the lighting shows off the feather details nicely.

Here’s hoping you have a sweet holiday!  Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!