Tuesday morning open thread

Joe is on the west coast, I'm in Chicagoland freezing my butt off, and Petey the Wodnerdog is in Maine with his human grandparents. Here in Chicago, we did our annual Christmas cookie making last night.



Ever since I was kid, we've made cookies at Christmas, then decorated them with colored sugar, chocolate ants (as we call them), and chocolate chips. Then we hang them on the Christmas tree. Mom says she got the recipe, and tradition, from a woman down the street in our old neighborhood. We use these great aluminum cookie cutters my mom has had since the 50s or early 60s. I ended up finding more of them on eBay and got a set for all of my siblings, so now we'll all have the tradition to pass on.




I've never heard of anyone else hanging cookies on the the tree, so I'm curious where this came from (just Googled it and apparently others hang cookies as well, but no word on where the tradition came from). Anyway, somehow I've become the keeper of the tradition, so it's now tradition that Uncle John gets the kids together to make the Christmas cookies. It's quite an enormous mess, but lots of fun (my nephews are in their 20s and still help).