One fun custom our Sandwich Generation family often enjoys during Advent is holiday baking. When I visited my long distance grandkids last year, we had a great time decorating and baking Pillsbury sugar cookies. They are great cookies to make with your grandchildren – easy and tasty! I cut them and the grandchildren decorated them. Since I cut them a bit on the big side, they all blended together on the cookie sheet to make one huge cookie. 
This year we decided to do it again, only I was determined to do a better job. Instead of cutting the Pillsbury sugar cookies too wide, I cut them just as the directions said (novel thought, I know 
).
Then I gave them to my grandchildren, along with five shades of thick decorative icing, three shades of thin icing, two packages of colored sugar “glitter,” and one jar of red cinnamon candies. Oh my, they had such a great time coloring, sprinkling, spreading, decorating, and tasting. When those sugar cookies were decorated, with all the icing, they were each about one inch wide and TWO INCHES HIGH!
I popped the pan into the oven for about seven minutes, then pulled it out, only to discover there were worse things that can happen to muchly-decorated sugar cookies than turning into one giant cookie. This year, the size of the cookies behaved perfectly, but the candy toppings melted all over the pan, leading to a LOT of scraping and soaking to clean those pans. The melted candies were hard as a rock and felt like they had blended into the pan. The cookies were just as hard to remove from the pan as the giant cookie had been.
I could have limited the girls and had them make picture perfect cookies – by doing a lot of the work myself. Frankly, though, the process was the most fun. So we just went back to square one, cut the cookies larger, and made one giant cookie per pan. They were thrilled with the whole process and I enjoyed it as well.
When they were all done and the sugar cookies were all baked, we cut them up, put them in plastic baggies to freeze, and enjoyed our tasty Advent celebration treats for the rest of the visit. We made enough that they should have cookies all the way through til Christmas. So even though I am back home a long ways away, I can still be a small part of their continuing Advent and Christmas season. Truly joy-filled activities for both grandparents and grandchildren!
For more Advent ideas and thoughts, be sure to start at A Pause in Advent and follow the various links for wonderful posts from around the world. This week's thought at Troc, Broc, and Recup on 1 Corinthians 13 is wonderful! Last week I discovered several great new ideas including some fun Advent ideas to share with my grandchildren such as Floss' Priorities Jar, Manka's snowflakes, and Felicity's crocheted Christmas chain. I'm looking forward to more fun this week.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
So true – doing it yourself and getting perfect results isn’t half as good! I love your photos of the various stages!
A few years ago an American friend organised a Cookie Swap around this time in December, and we ended up with 14 different bags of cookies in the freezer to last us all through the season. It was absolutely wonderful, and I would love to do it again.
.-= Floss´s last blog ..Love in Advent =-.
Hi Floss, Thank you
I remember doing Christmas cookie swaps eons ago when my kids were little! Those were so much fun! 