Many of my family traditions involve food. (See this earlier post about Chicken Szechwan and Peanuts.) This food-focused sense of tradition is especially true around the holidays. Christmas cookie baking was always a big deal growing up, and no Christmas season would be complete without a full complement of different cookie varieties. And it wasn’t just the resulting sweets that made holiday cookies so special; it was the process of making the cookies itself.
Every year around Christmas, just as school was letting out for break, my aunt and granddad (my grandfather on my mother’s side) would come for an extended visit. At some point early on in that visit, me, my sister, my mom, and my aunt would spend a day or two crafting the Christmas cookies for that year. While some of the varieties we made would vary from year to year, there was some staples that we always made: spritz, snowballs (better known as Russian tea cakes), and befitting of the German heritage on my mom’s side of the family, lebkuchen. (The recipe I have actually spells it lebkucken, but knowing a bit of German myself, I know that just can’t be right!)
Pie are Round 