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Gingerbread houses, Baking Cookies and Holiday Memories
Some of my favorite memories from my childhood are the perfectly imperfect ones…the messy moments that weren’t anything extraordinary at first glance, but proved to be very special looking back. Every holiday season leading up to Christmas I would bake cookies with my mom and sisters. My dad would work late, so it always felt like a big event when we got to stay up late and gather in the kitchen with my mom and all her baking supplies.
We would play Christmas music and always bake the same type of cookies each year. They were butter cookies. Handprint cookies to be exact, or at least that’s what we liked to call them. My mom would roll the dough and give me and my sisters an equal amount. We would take the dough in our hands and squeeze them, leaving the imprint of each of our little hands. Thinking back I guess they kind of looked like dumplings. I don’t know if this was something my mom did with her mother, or where she got the idea, but it was so perfectly simple and as a child it allowed me to soak in the moment with my family. Now as a mother, I wonder how my own mom felt watching the size of those handprint cookies grow each year, as my sisters and I grew.
I remember the laughs in that kitchen, shaking out way too many red and green sprinkles all over the cookies, powdered sugar everywhere…which was the real treat because my mom was (still is) a neat freak and the toppings everywhere felt like a party. The recipes weren’t anything extravagant, but we put them in pretty festive tins with some wax paper and gave them to family and friends, sometimes teachers at school too. Every year it was always the same and we looked forward to it.
Family Traditions with Kids
Oliver is only two, but I’m already finding myself looking forward to traditions new and old. Revisiting things we did last year with him as a baby, and introducing new traditions to him as he grows. Rob and I both fell down the rabbit hole of looking at old videos from last year during the holidays and I can’t believe how much Oliver has grown. It makes me want to soak in each moment even more and make every moment even more special, even when we’re exhausted.
As we begin to think ahead for the holidays, we’ve been utilizing our Walmart+ membership to help us plan. Walmart+ is the go-to membership for all your holiday moments and gatherings. With unlimited free delivery ($35 order min. Restrictions apply.), it makes planning and prepping way easier.I love that I can order anything on a whim with unlimited free delivery, because I’m always forgetting something and its all the same low prices that are in the store. Walmart has a ton of grocery items, so you can easily put together your baking list, gather items for meal planning, or holiday parties. We love to bake around here and like I said, it’s nothing professional, but it’s meaningful and fun family time for us. Gingerbread cookies, holiday decorating kits, and chocolate covered pretzels are always on our holiday list.
We had so much fun kicking off the holiday season the other day and baked some gingerbread cookies. They were perfectly imperfect, with icing everywhere and few broken legs on the gingerbread people, but I loved it. I know this is something we will do together for seasons to come.