Christmas Cookie Swap – Bonding over Baked Goods
Jocie and I just attended our annual cookie swap, hosted by another girlfriend of ours today; and I thought I’d post about it in case any of you out there are unfamiliar with this growing trend.
Presenting a wide array of cookies in your home seems to be a time-honored holiday tradition. Cookie “swapping” allows you to present that variety without spending the hours that our moms and grandmoms did baking and shopping for recipe-specific ingredients.
Here’s how today’s swap worked. Twelve of us baked six dozen of our favorite cookie to bring to the event. Our host kept tabs on who was bringing what as we each sent her our RSVP, so she made sure no two of us were bringing the exact same cookie. The twins and I made gingerbread people, icing some and leaving the rest plain.
Once at the Swap today, we each laid out our cookies on a platter, admired everyone else’s, then descended upon the kitchen for snacks and hot beverages. For an hour, we just talked – catching up with friends and meeting the other women we didn’t know. Then we each grabbed our own now-empty container and picked up a half-dozen of each cookie type in the spread. And, because we’re a chatty bunch, we then went back to conversing for a while longer before heading home.
Two benefits to this event: first, we all get to try cookies we never would have thought to make on our own, and we each have a lovely cookie platter to present to our holiday guests (or our hubbies and kids, as is my case).
And secondly, we took time out of the holiday rushing about to just sit down with friends, catch up, enjoy one another, and laugh. Most of us at that event are the primary gift-purchasers, house-cleaners, decorators, dinner-preppers, etc. for our households, so the time away from all that was great. In all the buzz, it’s easy to forget to ENJOY the holiday season.
So many thanks to our friend Colleen for hosting this event. I was thinking this week that I might like to try something like this with our neighbors. Although probably not just ahead of Christmas…maybe in the doldrums of post-New Year’s winter when snow shoveling is the only thing that brings us all together. It does require the up-front prep time, but the actual event is informal and friendly. And food really does seem to bring people together!
What do you think? What are some of your favorite holiday traditions? How do you take time to enjoy the season in the midst of all the flurry of activity?
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One Response to Christmas Cookie Swap – Bonding over Baked Goods
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December 15th, 2008 1:58 pm
My sister-in-law is the cookie baker in my family, so I luck out there (no baking for me, but lots of yummy cookies to enjoy.)
My family likes driving around (thank you lower gas prices!) and looking at all the crazy ways people have decorated their houses. It’s fun, free (relatively) and really gets you in the spirit.