Instead of Gingerbread Houses

For the past few years, my mom & sisters and I have gotten together in early December to make Gingerbread houses. We usually choose a day when the kids get out of school early, and they decorate gingerbread cookies while the moms do the serious work of the houses.

This year we decided to mix it up and do "fancy" sugar cookies instead. It was so much fun! My mom and I each made a triple batch of my new favorite sugar cookie recipe, and we all helped decorate them (using just the right icing recipe), and then we packaged them up cute to give away to friends. We made about 130 cookies altogether; it went pretty quick with four of all working on them at once.

Some were more plain and some were fancy; I decorated only three like this: We had a pretty good assortment of shapes & designs. And then, we packaged them up using cute scrapbook paper and cellophane bags.

It was a lot of fun and I think we'll be doing this again!