This past week, one of my husband’s co-workers gave him a bag of Springerle cookies for Christmas.  They were made by some nuns, and in the bag was a little flyer, complete with pictures of the nuns busily baking.  One of the captions said something about the nuns making 1,ooo cookies in a weekend.  “Hah!  Amateurs!”  I thought to myself as I read it.

Ok, I know some of you are thinking I’m crazy.  One thousand cookies in a weekend is nothing to be sneezed at.  Well, let me tell you, I am crazy, along with the rest of the women in my family.  We are cookie crazy.  Every year before the holidays, we all get together and make Christmas cookies.  Hundreds of Christmas cookies.  Thousands of Christmas cookies.  Yep, this year we baked for three days and made four thousand cookies.  No exaggeration.  We keep track on a spreadsheet, so we know exactly how to split them up once we’re done.

And now you’re all thinking that we must be super organized to get all those made in a weekend.  Well, sometimes we are, and sometimes we aren’t.  This year, we did pretty well.  I think we only had to go to the grocery store twice, and only screwed up the nutball recipe twice.  One year we went to the grocery five times, and that was just the first day!  We also tend to get a bit silly - funnels for bras, doughball fights, floury handprints on everyone’s butts, etc. 

 

See what I mean? 

A few of the bakers, whose names I won’t mention here, also manage to sneak off to TJMaxx for an hour or so, under the guise of going to pick up some necessary ingredient at the store.  We hand out silly awards on the last day, and take the usual picture of all of the bakers together in front of my aunt’s fireplace.

Then we go home and eat lots of cookies, because that’s the only thing we have room for in our freezers!