I went overboard again, imagine that. I saw this shirt the other day that said I have OCD (obsessive Christmas disorder). I’m waiting to receive it in the mail since it was clearly designed for me. Please tell me I’m not the only one who, more or less, loses ten years of maturity during the holidays. It’s passing so fast though, I was hoping to have my gingerbread house done by now, but so many things have come up this week and I haven’t had time to work on it yet. I’m determined to make one though. It’s one of my annual traditions and even if I only have time to make a 2 inch tall one, it’s gonna happen. There has to be a gingerbread house. But for now, you’ll have to settle for these cookies. My mom used to have a huge cookbook collection and every Christmas the shorter me loved to spend hours browsing the Christmas ones and looking at the same pictures I saw the year before. One of my favorites was the checkerboards in this one book and I have some really good memories of Mom helping me figure out how to make the design the right way. We sold or gave away all of those cookbooks when we moved though (I don’t actually own any cookbooks, are you shocked?) so I didn’t remember which book had that recipe. I decided to try to recreate it based on my rather extensive cookie-making experience and I think I got pretty close. Of course, once I had all this delicious cookie dough I realized how many shapes it could be made into and I couldn’t decide which ones to share. I did what I usually do and just shared them all because they were all so fun and festive, how could I pick? The trickiest ones are the checkerboards, and I honestly didn’t give them my best effort, as you can see by my lopsided ones. I know, how could I not make them look better, they were only the entire inspiration for this post! You guys should fire me. In my defence though, these were batch number two. When I made the first ones my mom was meeting with some friends and asked if there were any sweets ready that she could take to share and I can never resist the pleasure of sharing cookies so my prototype checkerboards were devoured before their debut. This sort of thing happens a lot but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyway, even though I failed with batch number 2, they are actually not that hard and they’re really fun. The best part is when you get to slice them and see your work paying off in the form of little checkerboards! I also loved the slice and bake. The trick to those is to let your inside shapes get frozen solid so you don’t mess them up when adding the outside dough. I did do my best to describe the process for making each of these cookies, but I’m not always very good at that part so if you’re having trouble you can let me know and I’ll try to explain it better. Or (since I haven’t quite gotten around to making videos) you can search youtube for videos of how to do the kind you want to try. I really should have made this easier on myself and just done plain old cut-outs, but my excitement for the season made me want to do everything at the same time. By the way, I know already have too many choices here but I forgot to make swirls. Just so you know, that’s also something you can do. All you have to do is stack two different colored rectangles and then roll them together into a log and slice the end. Voila, pinwheels! Oh, and speaking of the colors, I only made chocolate and vanilla and then added some red beet powder for the red in the candy cane cookies. You can use regular food dye, I just try really hard not to because I hate using that nastiness, although if you can find natural food coloring that’s great. I like the simplicity of the chocolate/vanilla contrast though. Do what you prefer, just make these because they are so, so good and they make everyone happy! The holiday season has to have some pretty cookies! These cookies have become an annual tradition in my family.