Christmas Cookies and Flour-Dusted Fingerprints on a Child’s Heart

Making Christmas cookies was an important tradition in our home. 

So was listening to our A Very Merry Christmas record collection, covering the tree, (and subsequently, the entire house!) in those silvery shredded plastic icicles that looked nothing like icicles, and being forced on Christmas morning to wait until Mom and Dad had brewed a full pot of coffee before we could open a single present. 

They had the slowest coffee maker in the world…

 

I’m not sure that refrigerated cookie dough was ever allowed inside our home, but it certainly was not permitted at Christmastime.  No, Mom’s Christmas cookies were of the old-fashioned, time-consuming, made-entirely-from-scratch variety.  And when the dough was thoroughly mixed and rolled into a thin sheet on the kitchen table, my brother and I would use the Twelve Days of Christmas cookie cutter set that was reserved just for this special occasion.  At that point I think a lot of moms would likely have scooped up the Partridges in Pear Trees and the French Hens and the Maids ‘a Milking, popped them in the oven, and called it a day, having done their motherly duty.  But not my mom!  No, after she had suffered through the mixing, rolling, cutting, and baking, then she allowed the painting to begin with a dozen hues of powdered sugar and water “paints” she had meticulously stirred together one-by-one.

The very best of memories prevail from those days spent baking cookies together.  Laughter.  Glorious smells.  The cozy warmth of the oven while a cold world lay just outside the kitchen window.

But eventually I became a mom myself and I started baking Christmas cookies with my own children.  The experience did much to open my eyes to what those cookie-baking days with Mom were really like.

My brother and I fought over almost every step of the process — who got to dump in the flour, who got to break the eggs, whose fault it was that an egg fell off the counter.  We somehow flung dough into strange and distant corners of the kitchen and we dusted flour all over the floor.  Mom would have a brief reprieve while the cookies were baked and cooled, but then we came to a newspaper-draped table and whipped out some little brushes that came with our paint books, (ones that may or may not have been properly washed after use with a paint tray,) and we’d fight over who got to use the green and who accidentally mixed red in with the yellow, and I would cry when the leg broke off of my Piper Piping, just like it did every single year.

When I started doing it myself, I came to see how one might think baking cookies with small children was something akin to Chinese water torture.  And yet I had a mom who was determined to do it.  Every. year.

And you must understand that my mom was fighting cancer for much of my childhood.  So why on earth did she put herself through unbelievable stress to bake Christmas cookies with us — cookies that were more work than hanging wallpaper one-handed and, by the time we were done with them, were uglier than homemade soap?

Because she was addicted to made-from-scratch butter cookies?  Hardly.

She did it because she realized traditions are important.  They provide a foundation on which beautiful memories and lasting influence can be built. She recognized that investing time in her children, in people, was worth the chaos and the mess and the inconvenience.  Every Christmas she had the opportunity to leave flour-dusted fingerprints on every inch of a little girl’s heart and mind and memory.  And I’m so glad she took advantage of the opportunity to do so!

I have twice the number of kids Mom had, so when we make Christmas cookies at our house, it has always been double the fun!  I have a similar recipe and the same cookie cutters and the kids make the same mess.  I stir together “paints” with powdered sugar and more artificial dye than I care to admit.  My kids argue over the green paint and fuss at one another when one of them accidentally mixes the red in with the yellow, and somebody gets upset when the leg breaks off their Piper Piping, just like it has happened every year for as long as I can remember.

And in the midst of the chaos I can press my eyes closed and be thankful for a mom who taught me to cherish those crazy family traditions; to never be too busy or too scheduled or too organized to provide my children with memories; to set aside, as often as possible, my own silly, self-centered desires in order to leave as many fingerprints on their lives as humanly possible.

Don’t you love the story of Jesus and how He did the same?  He was the Son of God come to earth on the most vital mission in history, yet he never bypassed an opportunity to touch a life.  He was never too busy, too driven, too important to reach out, even to take the smallest child into his lap and bless them.  He left fingerprints on the hearts of everyone He encountered and He continues to do the same today.

“He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David:  And He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
–Luke 1:32-33

My kids are getting older now, but they still ask when we are making Christmas cookies, and it does this mama’s heart good to see that they have latched onto a tradition that always meant so much to me.  The cooking-making is much easier now:  The fights will be fewer and the mess much smaller, and the memory-making will continue, and my opportunity to show my children that they matter more than my schedule and my commitments and my clean kitchen will present itself yet again.

If anyone was to look closely, they would see flour-dusted fingerprints on my heart, left by a mom who knew that Christmas traditions and good memories are so important.

Now I hope to leave behind lots of fingerprints of my own.