Baking Christmas sugar cookies and the Gingerbread men cookies during the last week of November has been my Christmas tradition for the past twenty years. I thought baking days were over for me now that the kids are in college but no….There was one Christmas season when I didn’t bake these cookies . Sometimes I wonder if I did that deliberately because there are no small kids at home. I found out that kids will be kids at heart and they look forward to traditions .
With a hectic schedule, I make sure that Christmas decorations are already set by the first five days of December. Before you think I am a super-mom, I am not. I am blessed with an intelligent yaya (Luijoe’s caregiver) who learned the basic rudiments on baking from me all these years. I was also blesssed with a mother who taught me how to bake since I was little girl. In turn, I was able to train my helpers so that they are armed with skills other than cooking or cleaning the house.
I can even open a small bakeshop if I wanted to but I’d rather not stress myself out. I know how it is to live in a bakeshop business. It’s not fun at all. It’s all work , work and no play. Baking should be a fun and enjoyable experience. Since I was nine years old and just before I got married, Christmas meant packing cookies into baskets, counting inventory, tying ribbons, answering calls, watching a stall , counting money and being stressed out. My ex-boyfriend now my husband thought it was a great idea to visit me during the Christmas Holidays. Haha, I told him “You will have to drive our van to stores all over Cebu if you want impress my dad.” And he drove for our business because that was the only way that he and I could be together for the holidays. I vowed that I would never bake in large-scale proportions; that I would bake because I loved to. I vowed that business should be both fun and profit at the same time.
Today, I bake out of love and pride as a mother. The only time I ever baked for profit was when my husband begged me to bake cookies for his boss because the boss liked my cookies. Ugh. My Christmas Angel Sugar cookies now adorn my Christmas angel collection. Aside from the Gingerbread Man Cookies here is my recipe for Christmas Sugar Cookies modified for our tropical climate.
