Sugar Cookies + Grandchildren = A Sweet Advent Treat

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One fun family tradition idea that 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 fun and easy holiday 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 those easy Pillsbury sugar cookies too wide, I cut them just as the directions said (novel thought, I know 🙂 ).

Then I gave the sugar cookies to my grandchildren,

along with five shades of thick decorative sugar cookie 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 cute and easy 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 easy sugar cookies were all baked, and well decorated with frosting and icing and sprinkles and sparkles, 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 family memories and traditions 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. 🙂

P.S. If you’d like to try your hand at easy sugar cookies holiday family traditions for you and your grandkids, but would prefer sugar cookie recipes from scratch, check out Cookie Craft and Cookie Christmas Craft. Lots of great ideas and tips for how to make cute sugar cookies. Enjoy. 🙂