Christmas Cookies, The Non-Martha Way!

I love Christmas time, especially now that I am a mommy of two sweet girls! It's so much fun recreating your childhood memories with your own children! Baking cookies is perhaps one of my MOST favorite traditions to do with my children. I'll admit though, I am no Martha Stewart when it comes to baking in the kitchen. It always seems that Martha's kitchen is way too tidy for real life, and I always felt a little sad for the perfectly dressed kiddos on her Christmas Baking Special as they were guided in making the "perfect" cookie so that it would win Martha's approving motto, "It's a Good Thing!" That is not to say that I wouldn't love to have that pristine kitchen with the perfectly baked golden sugar cookies with every last granule of sugar perfectly placed, oh wait a second, that wouldn't be real life now would it! Instead, my actual "perfect" sugar cookie starts here with this little package.
Yes, they are store bought, Pillsbury sugar cookies that I roll out so that we can make our cookie. I have tried a gazillion sugar cookie recipes, including Martha's, and I always find that the dough is too salty, bitter, bland, etc. I like a sweet sugar cookie, after all they are called sugar cookies for a reason, and Pillsbury's are the best in my opinion. There's no need to stand on formality when it comes to baking. Tradition is tradition, and my kids have the best time making these little goodies whether I made the dough or bought it from Butler and Bailey. It's all good to them!

I roll out the dough as any other home made dough, flour it, and use old fashioned steel cookie cutters to cut our cookies. We've tried other kinds of cookie cutters, but these old ones always make the best size for little hands.







The girls go to town bedazzling their cookies with all kinds of cookie sprinkles. It's a big mess, but the end result is just as nice.


Howie even gets in on the cookie baking activity and snaps a few pics of me and helps put the cookies in the oven. We all have read "The Little Red Hen" so it's important to help out if you want a taste of the end product.
Finally the cookies are golden perfection and ready to be eaten. See they look pretty darn good, I think.
And "It's a good thing" that my girls have truly had a great time baking the cookies whether we made our dough from scratch (which we do with other recipes) or bought our dough from the store.
In the end, they are all "Martha" perfect just the way they are!