Getting in a Christmas Spirit

To get into a Christmas mood today, we baked gingerbread cookies.

I have mixed feelings about this endeavor.

In fact, I kinda hate it, and yet I do it every year.




Don't get me wrong... I love cookies. I usually love making cookies. I mean really-- cookies. Nothing better. I could eat them all day.





And doing them with a silly little person --rolling, cutting, baking, playing with the cookie cutters-- of course it's exasperating fun!




But when I get to the decorating part--



--I start wondering why I bother. I don't like making and dealing with the sticky frosting and getting it into a bag with the decorating tip (not to mention "wasting" a perfectly good ziploc bag... oh be quiet. I'm weird that way.). Then my hand gets tired and then the frosting gets too soft from my body heat and it starts running and spurting everywhere and then I get it all over my hands and there's the "sticky" part again and then Jonah bumps me and the gingerbread guys have mustaches and arg I'm starting to stick to everything and the lines are all squiggly. I'm to the point where I could almost -almost- buy those little tubes of ready-to-use decorating frosting. But I'm too much of a frugal, do-it-myselfer that I can't quite bring myself to buy those. Why buy something when I am completely capable of making it? Besides, I live out in the booney and can't just run to the store for things. So I make frosting and put it in little baggies with those decorating tips.

Ugh. But I continue to do cut-and-decorated cookies every Christmas because they're fun for Jonah (or whatever other little person I've borrowed for the purpose of making myself crazy with these cookies) and because... well... it's Christmas and Christmas always seems to involve a trip to the looney bin.

But Jonah had fun and we did something Christmasy together and now I can move on to the more fun Christmas cookies that don't involve frosting.