Family Tradition

By: Rian Salinas

Every year for Christmas, my mom and I make christmas cookies. We have been doing it for as long as I can remember. At first we did it so i could give them to “santa,” but now we can’t break the habit. There is nothing special about the cookies, they are just sugar cookies cut into different shapes like santa hats and snowflakes. My dad hates sprinkles, especially the ones that just look like sugar. Because of that, on christmas day I noticed that the only parts of the cookies that were not eaten were the ones with sprinkles, or he would just eat around them and leave the parts of the cookies with sprinkles on the plate.That’s how little Rian pieced the puzzle together and figured out who was actually posing as santa. After that, I could only assume the easter bunny wasn’t actually a fluffy bunny roaming my house in the middle of the night leaving chocolate eggs, and peeps on the floor for me to step on. When making the cookies, it was mainly just my mom doing all the work, my dad munching when everything was done, and my brother would try and snack on whatever he could during the process whether it was icing or raw pieces of dough laying around. Typically, you would think that decorating the cookies would be the best part, but it was always my least favorite, I would always get frustrated with the icing, make a mess with sprinkles, and there was always what felt like hundreds of cookies so it was always a tiring process that started off fun and then turned into a disaster. And with disaster comes a mess that needs to be cleaned and no one likes cleaning. The sticky icing made bowls very hard to clean, the small sprinkles were hard to pick up, and the amount of tools used made the job ten times harder due to the massive load of dishes to do. But the process was always worth it, they always turned out great and our friends and family enjoyed them as much as I did. Yes there are pros and cons, but we still haven’t shakin the tradition to this day.