Christmas with Kids: Gratitude Gifts

In all honesty, I hate decorating christmas cookies with the kids. It’s something about the icing dripping off the ceiling and sprinkles being impaled into the ceramic tile of the floor just makes me not want to embrace that mess. Super mom, I am not. Then as I was browsing the kid’s kitchen section of Imperial Sugar‘s website the other day I happened upon a recipe for cookies that were festive yet lacked icing and sprinkles. Yes! Those were my christmas cookies to make with the kids.

Here’s a tip; the best way to get your kids to help you clean the house is by telling them that you will make cookies when it is done.

So after everything was picked up and momma was happy, we all made Peppermint Cookie Canes. This recipe was fun because it’s a little different. It uses granular sugar and powdered sugar which makes a soft dough that needs to stay cool to work with. I love learning different ways to bake.

Once the ingredients were mixed and chilled in the fridge for an hour, we all sat down to make the cookies into candy canes.

The older two concentrated so hard to make the perfect cookie dough snakes that they would then shape into a candy cane.

I actually think this was the quietest they had been all week. They were concentrating hard to make the perfect cookies. Look! No icing spilled all over the entire kitchen.

The Peppermint Cane Cookies were a little too hard for the three year old but she still had a blast. She saw me showing the girls how to roll the dough into snakes first. That’s all she needed and she was off, making a giant red snake cookie that we did bake just for her. Who needs a candy cane when you can have a christmas snake? (not me.)

I love this picture. It’s the perfect snapshot of childhood and fun times. The cookies aren’t perfect but they are gorgeous and were made with love.  During christmas it’s easy to forget that it’s not about shopping or stress. Sometimes it just needs to be about little girls bringing out their inner Martha Stewart.

When the cookies were done we slipped them into baggies with a die cut of holly. The presentation was simple and easy but that’s what we were going for. Our goal was simply to make people smile and tell them thank you.

Thank you for what?

We wanted to thank people for their amazing christmas lights. People sometimes are so giving by having huge light displays that take hours to put out but rarely do they get to hear people tell them that their christmas lights made them smile. So we wrote a few notes, with hand colored pictures.

Then we hopped in the car, blasted the holiday station on Pandora and found a few of our favorite decorated homes.

And with a ton of giggling, they slipped each home a bag of cookies a little note into their mailbox. It’s a simple way to express our gratitude to people that we don’t know, but that took time out of their lives to make us happy.

Now that’s a great lesson for my kids (and a great reminder for me as well).

If you need a great project to do with your kids this holiday season, check out the amazing (seriously amazing) and enormous selection of kids crafts and recipes in the Kid’s Kitchen of ImperialSugar.com.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Imperial Sugar. However they are the only brand of sugar I use and they’re local to me! So hey! I would have wrote about them anyway. Since my goal is to always be real, I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t stand behind it.