Monday Motivator

Merry Christmas!

This weekend Mason and I made Christmas cookies. It is really a task with a 4 year old, but as much work as it is, it is worth every moment of the 15 minutes he spends decorating a dozen cookies.

I remember when I was growing up, my mom did lots and lots of baking. She must have started right after Thanksgiving and made every kind of Christmas cookie in the book. I helped with some, but decorating the cut-out cookies was the best. When I was little, the frosting we used was homemade butter cream. It was thick and sweet, and never got hard. That meant that we had to lay the cookies out one by one, and you couldn't stack them up without smearing and messing them up. We had to decorate them using a butter knife, so the detail was not that good. We used sprinkles and shiny gold and silver balls, so even with the butter knife spreading, they were the prettiest cookies of the season.

Mason has a few advantages. Being a former professional cake decorator, I have bags and tips. We mix our icing using meringue powder so it dries hard thus, not messing up your work of art. We don't have the gold and silver balls anymore because they are no longer for sale in California, but we have ways around that. We have a ball talking about the kind of cookies we are making, happy, mad, wacky, and even "the one-eyed guy." Pretty much anything goes, and isn't that how you want to remember it when you are all grown up? "I got to decorate the cookies any way I wanted to." That is how I remember my mom facilitating my creativity, and that is the same gift I want to give to Mason.

What are your holiday traditions? Do you have a favorite Christmas memory? I would love to hear it, and maybe I can share some of them next week. That would be fun. In the meantime, enjoy the picture of our Christmas cookies and this motivator.

"What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it." Thomas Carlyle