Christmas Cookies

Another Roundup Story

The children were all nestled snug in their beds. Nadine and I started the Christmas baking, twelve dozen sugar cookies. These were going to be the best sugar cookies ever made! Santas, snowmen candy canes and Christmas trees. The santas and candy canes were decorated with red and white sugar. Glistening like a Christmas card. Each Christmas tree was sprinkled with green sugar, frosted on the tips of branches with white, and hard round silver candies were placed carefully like the decorations on a real tree. Snowmen with scarves and brooms. One hundred and forty four cookies. all placed around the kitchen and on the table, to cool and be packed away.
By this time were exhausted, the bed looked so inviting and the last thing we wanted to do is have visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. We crashed just as soon as we hit the pillow.
I don't recall which one of us woke up first. I don't even really remember the reaction. In the kitchen there was no evidence that we even made a single cookie, not so much as a crumb. I know we hadn't dreamed all that hard work, all that artistic beauty.
Gee the kids are quiet aren't they? There in the living room, all over the living room, all over the carpet the couch the chair, all over the coffee table, the lamps the cushions. Crumbs! Crumbs everywhere, soggy bits of cookie ground into the fabric.
Three little children with guilt ridden faces. Not that you could see the guilt. It was too encrusted with sugar, icing and candies.
Two little boys and a little girl, with hair sticking up, faces painted with all the colours of Christmas. The only thing that takes longer than meticulously decorating one hundred and forty four sugar cookies, is cleaning up one hundred and forty four sugar cookies. That is really GROSS.