Get your Holidays going with some Pillsbury Christmas Cookies
When I think back on making Christmas cookies with my family, the first thing I remember is the smell. Once December started, the kitchen felt busy in a way that only happens that time of year. We always made butter cookies. Fresh out of the oven they were great, but if you forgot about them for a day or two they could double as paperweights, which never stopped us from trying to eat them anyway.
My job was decorating. I would sit with bowls of colored sugar and try to make each cookie look festive, though half the time they ended up looking like something from an elementary school art table. I also took every chance I could to sneak a spoonful of batter when no one was paying attention. That usually led to a mild stomachache later, but at age ten that felt like the cost of doing business.
By the middle of the month the jar was empty. None of us wanted to haul out the mixing bowls again, so we switched to store cookies or the Pillsbury dough log. Those went fast too. A single log could vanish during one commercial break. My mother would warn us that she only bought two or three, so once they were gone, the cookie season was over. Every year we acted like this was new information.
That is why this old ad makes me pause. It shows how you can take simple rounds of dough and pinch them into stars, trees, hearts and so on. We never tried anything like that. We treated the dough log like a loaf of bread, slice and bake, no questions asked. Looking at these shapes, I can almost picture us at the kitchen table trying it out, making a mess, arguing about whether a lopsided star still counted as a star.
It is funny how a small idea can change the way you remember something. I can imagine those misshapen cookies cooling on the counter and us eating them anyway, proud of how they turned out even if they looked nothing like the ad.