Making Cookies Memories with the Grandkids

    During the holidays, I decided to have my four grandchildren over to make cookies, thinking it would be the start of a wonderful tradition. After all, who doesn’t like making cookies at grandmother’s house, right?

    Well, now that I’ve done it—and lived to tell about it—I thought I’d share some helpful tips, in case you’re contemplating a cookie-making day with your grandkids.

1.    Be sure to prepare the supplies ahead of time and set them aside, otherwise the grandkids will wear the bowls on their heads, throw the flour around like it’s snow, and eat frosting right from the tube.

2.    Cover the work area with parchment paper so the cookie dough won’t stick to your table and dry to the consistency of cement and have to be removed with a chisel and sander.

3.    Throw the parchment paper away after the grandkids decide to tear it into confetti “snow.”

4.    Sprinkle liberal amounts of flour on the table in another attempt to keep the dough from sticking. When the grandkids are done making life-size snow angels in the flour, give each one a lump of refrigerator dough to work with. (Never make cookie dough from scratch. There’s no point.)

5.    Set out rolling pins. To keep the grandkids from dueling with them like light sabers, threaten to call Santa.

6.    Once the grandkids have pounded their balls of dough into lumpy misshapen pancakes, give them cookie cutters in fun shapes, such as snowmen, gingerbread boys, Barbies and army men.

7.    When they’re done using the cookie cutters as action figures, let them make popular free-form designs, such as snakes, balls, and more lumpy pancakes.

8.    Give them bottles of sprinkles to decorate the cookies. After they pour the entire contents onto one cookie, let them eat the rest of the sprinkles that have fallen onto the floor.

9.    Place the haphazardly decorated cookies on a cookie sheet and bake them for various lengths of time depending on how unevenly thick and thin they are.

10.    While the cookies bake and cool, let the grandkids squirt tubes of frosting directly into their mouths to stop them from asking, “Are they ready yet?”


11.    When the cookies are cool—and if there’s any frosting left in the tubes—have the grandkids see how high they can tower the frosting on one cookie before the tower falls over onto your shirt.

12.    Finally, offer the grandkids a cookie. If they’re too full from eating the sprinkles, dough and frosting, let them feed the cookies to the dog and then go play, while you clean off the furniture where they’ve wiped their dough-covered hands.

13.    When the parents arrive, show them the cookie snakes and balls and pancakes that their gifted children have made, then collect the cookies into baggies, and send everyone home with a promise to repeat “Cookie Making at Grandma’s” again next year. (Next year buy premade cookies, give them to the grandkids when they arrive, and send them outside to play the rest of the day.)

14.    Eat the broken cookies that are covered with red hots that nobody liked, wash them down with a vodka latte, and make plans to spend the holidays in Hawaii next year.

15.    That’s how memories are made.