Online Advent Calendar

 
Dasher by Mirabilia

Welcome, welcome! For those of you that have never been here before, I'm glad to have you! And for my regular readers, in case you don't know what's going on, I'm participating in Jo's annual Advent calendar blog hop. Click on that link and you can enjoy previous days and wait around for days to come!

Now stop dashing around for just a little while (see what I did there?) and let's hang out and talk about...COOKIES!!

Jo asked us to talk about festive foods we enjoy. Well, for me, Christmas means cookies. Ever since college, I have made at least six or seven varieties each year. It all started with one Christmas cookies cookbook (from Better Homes and Gardens) that came as a freebie with some other book my mom ordered. I confiscated it and started out trying new cookies each year. As time went on, though, my family started DEMANDING barring the door if I showed up without requesting certain cookies, so now there are three favorites that get made every year: Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread cookies (recipe here...they're the bottom right cookies in the picture above), Eggnog Thumbprints (above the gingerbread...this recipe is close, and you can substitute milk + rum extract for the rum), and Buried Cherry cookies (here, which my family continually amuses me by pronouncing "burrrried churrries"). Yeah...these:

NOM.

I really do enjoy trying new cookies, though. This was a fun one...

 

A Dutch Stroopwafel, filled with caramel. You set it on top of your teacup (or coffee mug, if you're into that sort of thing) to melt the caramel before munching and dunking away!

Each year I give away some cookies to a select few who really appreciate them.

 

One year I gave some to a friend and never heard a thing from him. I finally asked, "Did you enjoy the cookies?" His response was, "Oh, yeah, they were good." He was off the list!

This year I joined the Cookie A Sock Club, and in addition to two beautiful patterns and an oh-so-squishable skein of sock yarn every two months, I also get two cookie recipes.

 

I've tried a lot of new things this year thanks to the club, and I've baked a lot more, so maybe in the future it won't seem so onerous to "only" try three or four new cookies at Christmas.

If you have read this far (whether or not you had to get up and take a cookie break), CONGRATULATIONS!! You're entitled to a giveaway! I went a little nuts on Black Friday ordering Kindle books, and I ended up getting a few special offers as a result. Since I'd already gotten a lot of new books, I wasn't that interested in getting more, so I thought I'd share with you guys! Even if you don't have a Kindle, you can use the free Kindle app on almost any device, or you can read online. So if you'd like one of these books, leave a comment on this post (you don't need to tell me which book you'd like now). Here's the list:
Fiction books
Mystery books
Science Fiction books
Young Adult books

I'll pick some winners on Boxing Day (the 26th). I *think* I can gift the books even if you're not in the US, but if that turns out not to be true, I'll substitute something else. =) If you win, you'll need to get your email address to me before the 31st.

Thanks for joining me, and I hope you all have a blessed Christmas filled with fun, friends and family...and COOKIES!