Christmas Cookies

“Make laughter the soundtrack of your marriage.” – Dave Willis, pastor and author

A couple of weeks ago, I had the “pleasure” of watching my husband Alan be good at yet another thing that he’d never done before. Yay for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m filled with pride whenever I witness Alan excel, which happens to be ALL THE TIME. But when we participate in the same activities, side-by-side, his success just seems to magnify my own clumsy efforts.

A friend of ours had invited us to her home for a Christmas cookie decorating party. She and her husband had several batches of homemade sugar cookies, bags and bottles of icing, and what seemed like a small warehouse worth of candy sprinkles and other decorations ready for us upon our arrival.

As is often the case with many things, Alan and I – both novice cookie decorators – took two distinct approaches, which led to two drastically different results. His Pinterest-perfect cookies earned him ooh and ahhs, while my “whimsical” efforts garnered the consolatory comment, “Hey, they all taste the same in the end.”

“So how come your cookies turned out so much better than mine?” I asked him earnestly, after we got home. Having just spent a fun-filled afternoon with cherished friends, we were both in a good mood, so I knew some playful banter was in store.

“Your piping is kind of a mess,” he blurted out, shaking his head.

I chuckled. Alan is an engineer, so I could only imagine what the breaks in my icing, the unevenness of my outlines, and my apparent inability to trace the exact edges of the cookies were doing to his psyche.

“So what should have I done differently?” 

“When you’re piping, I found it helps to rest your wrist against your cookie tray so that you have better control. Each time I started working on a cookie, I’d do so in the lower right hand corner of my cookie tray. That way you can brace against both edges of the tray. You can’t just hold your piping bag mid-air and expect a clean outline.”

“Well that’s exactly what I did!”

Alan raised his eyebrows disapprovingly as he glanced down at my tray of cookies and then back up at me, signalling that I had proved his point. He carried on with his lecture.

“And when you’re piping the outline, I think it helps if you hold the tip of the icing bag close to the cookie – no more than 1 mm from the surface of the cookie – for optimal results.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s just something I figured out on the fly.”

“Well I didn’t figure that out.”

“Didn’t you learn anything from the first to the last cookie that you decorated?” Alan asked, with playful condescension.

“You know what? NO. No, I did NOT!” I replied, feigning annoyance. “I was just winging it. Can’t you wing it for once?”

“That’s not really my style. Besides, I don’t want to end up with… ummm… errr… ugly cookies.”

“Hey!”

Despite his insult, I continued with our post-mortem.

“So were you following the pictures closely?” Our hosts had printed out some photos of finished cookies, for ideas and inspiration.

“Yes, those are like a blueprint,” he replied, matter-of-factly. 

“OH. MY. GOD! Did you engineer your cookies?” I asked, with a mixture of dismay and disgust.

“There really wasn’t any engineering involved,” he said calmly.

“You know what I mean. Do you have to apply your engineering mindset to everything you do? Did you stop and plan out every cookie before you started decorating it?”

“Well yeah,” he replied, as if to say, “Doesn’t everyone?”

“And how did you get that skin tone for your Santa cookie?” I asked.

“Oh, I mixed the pink, yellow, and white icing. I tested it, of course, before I flooded that part of my cookie.”

I rolled my eyes. 

“Ugh, that’s way too much work. I couldn’t be bothered. I just flooded my Santa face with white icing and freehanded the rest.”

“You know, if you exercised a little patience, you might have gotten different results.”

“Hey, my imperfect cookies were made with pure joy. Yours may be precision-engineered and Pinterest-perfect, but they’re heartless. Your cookies have no soul!”

We both broke out into raucous laughter.

Then, after sampling each other’s cookies, we both agreed… They all taste the same in the end!