Something that my sisters and I always do together over Thanksgiving Break is decorate Christmas cookies. It’s a really fun way to start getting in the holiday spirit early on, and Thanksgiving Break is the last time we see each other before winter break, so it’s the perfect time to start being festive. 

We ended up making about 50 cookies, but here are some of my best ones and how I made the designs. In order to make more intricate designs, it’s best to cut the tip of the icing tube to be very skinny. I also recommend having a few toothpicks on hand to help you spread the design on the cookie to how you want it to be.

For the Christmas tree cookie, I started by just spreading a thin layer of white icing on a round cookie. It’s important to make sure that your cookies are fully cooled after baking before you start your design, otherwise the heat could melt the icing or make it come out sloppy. I let the white icing dry before I started on the tree. For the tree, I drew three triangles on top of each other in green icing, and then a small square at the bottom for the trunk. I then used a toothpick to move the green icing around the space so that the tree was shaped how I wanted it to be. After this layer had dried, I used red and purple icing to draw baubles on the tree. 

To make the Christmas wreath, I only used red and green icing. This design turns out really nice, but it’s also really easy to make! The best way to do the wreath portion of the cookie is to draw jagged lines with the icing around the circumference of the cookie until you have a thick ring. I ended up having to trace over it about 3 times to make it look full enough for the look I was going for. I added my red, white and green sprinkles to the green icing before drawing the bow. It’s important to add sprinkles before the icing has dried so that they don’t fall off the cookie. After the icing had dried and the sprinkles were affixed to the cookie, I drew on the red bow by making two teardrop-shaped dots and lines to give it the right shape. The bow was actually more difficult than I had anticipated, so I shaped it a bit with my toothpick as well.

For the snowflake cookie, I used my tube of white icing to draw an X and then another line through the middle to give the snowflake its well-known six-pointed shape. I then drew in more lines at the tips of each point to give the snowflake more of a design. 

To add some color, I added blue sprinkles, which I also think gave it a more wintery-look. Some sprinkles will get stuck to the cookie and not the icing, so you can use tweezers to remove these if it bothers you.

The red and green striped cookie took a little more effort. I drew red and green alternating zig-zags on the cookie. The important thing to remember here is that you won’t be able to finish the design if the icing dries, so you have to get down the stripes relatively quickly. After you’ve finished the zig-zag stripes, take a toothpick and drag it gently through the icing in the opposite direction that the stripes are facing. Do this over the top of the cookie to get the effect that I’ve achieved here. Just remember that the icing can’t have dried at all for this to work!

The cookie with the truck and Christmas tree is definitely my favorite one. The first thing I did was outline the cookie with a thin white line and then layer more white icing on the bottom to make it look like the snow on the ground. Then, I drew two circles on top of this layer to represent the wheels of the truck. I drew two rectangles to make up the truck. I put a Red Hot in each of the circles to serve as the tires. After the icing dried, I drew the window of the truck with white icing. 

Then, I made the tree in the back the same way that I did on the first cookie, just with smaller triangles. I made sure to angle it so that it looked like it was leaning against the bed of the truck. Finally, I put small white icing dots in the negative space to make it look like it was snowing.

Decorating Christmas cookies is so much fun for me and I’m so happy that it’s become a tradition with my sisters and me. We made a lot of cookies, but these were some of the ones that I thought came out the best. Happy holidays!