Fill in the blank, It's not Christmas without__________________________. Mine is a Christmas tree. what is yours?

[3catwoman3]

37. Spritz cookies. I make hundreds of them...

...in a variety of shapes, and decorated with different colors of sugar crystals and sprinkles. I have at least a dozen different colors.

The recipe is very simple - butter, sugar, eggs, a bit of salt, and vanilla. I use a salad shooter, which pops them out really fast with minimal effort, and because they're small, a large cookie sheet can hold 2 dozen. I prefer them slightly underbaked.

Before getting the salad shooter, I had a hand-cranked cookie press. By the time I'd be done with pans and pans of cookies, my right wrist would be really sore.

Spritz cookies remind me of my maternal grandmother. She would always bake them in the summer, when the extended family would get together in my mother's small hometown in Minnesota. My mom was the oldest of 4 - 3 girls, then a boy. None of my grandparents 4 kids stayed in the hometown. My uncle, the youngest of the 4, and only one still living, ended up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. My family, after several moves, settled in Rochester NY. The second daughter married an Army officer and they were all over the place until retiring in Virginia. The third sister lived in Wisconsin for many years, and then my uncle got a job in the Wash DC area, and they moved to Chevy Chase.

So, we saw each other usually only once a year, in Minnesota. There were always Spritz cookies, in a large glass apothecary jar that had been in my grandfather's dental office. My grandmother frosted the cookies, as well as sprinkled them, and they were very pretty. I'm not ambitious enough to frost mine - too much work.

I was the cousin fortunate enough to inherit the apothecary jar, and it is one of my most treasured possessions.