Emma's Christmas Sugar Cookies

Recipes
These are the sugar cookie and royal icing recipes we used, both from The Cookie Countess.

• Sugar Cookies: Sugar Cookie Recipe for Cookie Cutters
• Icing: Royal Icing Recipe for Decorating Cookies

Sugar Cookies in the Afternoon
Normally, spending 10+ hours with someone might get a bit long... even if you really like them. Not so with Emma. She laughs easily. She's thoughtful and eloquent. She considers her life and future thoroughly. Her kindness will warm you from the inside out.

Emma is a lovely person to spend 10+ hours with. You'd no sooner grow weary of her than you'd grow weary of a fire on a cold day.

Emma is on the calendar for double duty: we're baking sugar cookies in the afternoon, and she's staying for a party in the evening. Emma chose sugar cookies as her recipe to share because every Christmas season Emma makes sugar cookies with her family. It's a tradition that started with her mom, Melanie, and then revitalized with her Sisters, Amy & Patty.

If family is whoever and whatever you make it, then Emma has made hers very well.

Melanie the Badass, Melanie the Tradition Creator
A note about Emma's Mom, Melanie

Melanie is a registered dietitian, which is a cool and interesting career, and also why Emma and I mini-bonded over food safety practices. Melanie was a stay-at-home mom, which is so much work and I could never, but also it all sounds sorta sweet... dietitian, stay-at-home mom, making Christmas cookies with her two girls. Lots of sprinkles and rainbows, both figuratively and likely literally, especially when it's cookie season. That vibe sounds nice.

Melanie was also an officer in the Navy, and worked for the Colorado's state prison system.

My eyes fully saucered when Emma dropped those nuggets into the conversation. It turns out Emma's Sprinkle Bae mom was also, in Emma's words, "kind of a badass". (She says her mom's stories from the prisons are particularly exceptional.)

So there that is, just for the record. Apropos to nothing, but I strongly felt you needed to know.

When Melanie the Badass decided it was time to raise some badass children, the family moved to Minnesota for the schools and the cold, and here they've been, since.

Et Voila!, A Tradition
Many traditions have unclear beginnings. We may know when and where they started. Less often, we know why they started. And even less often, why they stuck... why they became important.

Not so, here. This tradition was willed into existence by Melanie; it's a tradition because it was explicitly meant to be one. Melanie realized her young family didn't have any traditions, and she wanted to create something special for herself and her kids. Something her two girls could carry on.

I love this insight -- it's a marvel of an insight: A) Traditions are, in fact, important. B) If you don't have any, you can, in fact, just create one... as long as everyone buys in and participates for a while -- et voila!, a tradition.

And so, from wisdom and will, a tradition was created. Every Christmas little Emma and her sister, Megan, got to make sugar cookies. Over the years, dough was rolled, icing was dyed, decorations were piped, fun was had, memories were created.

The highlight of sugar cookie day was always the construction of Christmas cookie trees. Emma's grandfather made stars of different sizes from an old, metal coffee can and, two by two with spacers in between, they'd stack up the tree and dump sprinkles over the top.

And here we have part 1 of the tradition, which lasted until Emma was 15? 16? When contemplating why there was a break, she reflected it's not often, as a teenage girl, to have moments of peace where you don't have to rush and do something -- especially around the holidays. So while the family still made time for each other during the holidays, for about 4 years there were no Christmas cookies.

Fortunately, the tradition comes back around once Emma meets Jesse and, soon after, Amy & Patty.

A Bulleted History of Jesse and Amy & Patty

• My friend Emma has a husband: Jesse.
  

• Jesse has an older sister: Amy
  

• Amy has a partner: Patty
  

• Jesse and Amy are 2 of 4 siblings -- Jesse is the youngest, Amy is the oldest. 20 years separate the two.
  

• Emma notes that Jesse and Amy are replicas of each other in many ways.

• For Jesse's conscious life, he's always known Amy & Patty as a couple -- by the time Jesse turned 2, Amy and Patty had found each other, and they've been together, since.

• Jesse simply refers to Amy & Patty as his Sisters.
  

• Much of what Jesse knows about adulting good was learned from Amy & Patty.

• Patty has always doted on Jesse (and the other boys) with as many baked goods as their stomachs can carry. And in many cases, even more than that.

• Jesse is very close with his Sisters, Amy & Patty.

Emma meets Jesse. Emma meets Amy & Patty.
Emma met Jesse in Astronomy class during their first year in college. The two didn't date right away -- it took a while for those planets to align -- but they did become good friends. As a part of that friendship, Emma also met Amy & Patty... basically inevitable since Jesse was so close with his Sisters.

Emma quickly became fast friends with Amy & Patty. Such fast friends, that by the holiday season of their sophomore year, Amy & Patty ask if Jesse and Emma (still not dating) might be interested in doing something cute for the holidays... like, oh I don't know, some type of sugar cookie situation?

It's very worth noting: Amy & Patty are completely unaware of Emma's decade of sugar cookie tradition and her recent cookie making lapse.

Also worth noting: They certainly have no sense that the four of them will eventually become a holiday season anchor for the two families -- theirs and Emma's. They don't know that they're revitalizing a tradition that will eventually continue on through Emma and Jesse dating, and their marriage, and their (at the moment still hypothetical but very likely) future children.

They don't know, eventually, Emma will consider them her Sisters, too, because family is whoever, and whatever, you make it.

Amy & Patty simply think sugar cookies would be fun and a wonderful opportunity to build something meaningful with enjoyable people. It's a lovely insight.

So, of course, Emma is absolutely into it, and that's how the tradition begins again.

Every year, the family makes Christmas cookies. There are gentle arguments over which shapes get cut out of the dough. Amy and Patty love corgis, so there are always a few of those. Emma takes what she's fairly sure is a cardinal cutout and uses it to make at least 1 redbird and 1 bluebird. Smaller Mickey Mouse and Batman cookies are baked up for snacks while decorating the larger cookies.

The pretty cookies are generally the work of Patty and Emma; if one of the polar bears has its head removed from its body, in a scene reminiscent of a True Crime mystery? That's clearly the work of Amy and Jesse.

It's been 10 years at this point, and it's still going strong.

A Party In The Evening
As we talk and bake and I learn more, there's a thread of hope and perseverance that weaves its way through all of Emma's stories about her life and family. Getting through really rough times to something much better. Or feeling like you don't fit in or don't belong, and then you find your people. Having your faith in people rattled and then restored. Being brave enough to help the people you love heal, even when doing so hurts.

And also: A social worker who said an adoption would happen "over my dead body" and then died the next day. Air traffic control, dog training, first drinks. Sex, religion, and money. Alaskan cruises, homemade vanilla. How Emma will raise her future kids.

It's a fun time. It's fun despite realizing my kitchen is under-prepared for the back half of this cookie making adventure. I have no cute cookie cutters... only lowballs to make circles, and some squares of various sizes for cutting brownies and shortbread. We can pipe icing, but there's no dye to color it.

You know what? It doesn't matter. Not a bit. It's just fun.

In fact, when guests arrive, and we've set the cookies aside, they almost immediately ask if they can decorate the remaining stash. I'm not a part of their conversation... I'm off having chats with other guests in other parts of my home, but they're there for an hour? An hour plus? Decorating, hanging, talking, sharing.

I can't help but think, "Huh... it works." Just like Emma knew it would. There's something magical about decorating sugar cookies.

Recipe Notes
Rolling and cutting the dough works better when it's cold. Try splitting the dough in two, so half can be chilling in the freezer while bakers work the other half.

Sandwiching the dough between parchment paper when rolling prevents sticking while avoiding the introduction of too much flour into the dough.

Emma and family routinely experiment with new recipes -- find something that looks fun and go nuts.