Christmas cookies

This weekend, in my utter craziness, I decided that our Mother's group should host a Cookie Decorating party for the kids of our Church.  Fortunately, everyone I talked to was on board!  A couple Mothers and I got together Friday night and made 10 batches of cookies, which translated to over 600 cookies!  We had about 35 kids RSVP, but you never know, and we might have just been making batches, throwing them into the fridge and then we counted and realized we had 10 batches!  We used the Church kitchen and had a great time.  Thank goodness for the convection ovens and my friends who so graciously stayed late to help, we couldn't have done it without them! 
The next morning we made some frosting, laid out the cookies and said get to it kids! 

I forgot to figure on the little kids and their love of frosting and sprinkles, many of the cookies were towering with frosting and sprinkles, which would be cool if the kids were just making these for themselves, but we decided to have them make some and donate some for the home-bound parishioners. 

 We decided to use royal icing and put it in plastic bags and cut out an end for them to squeeze onto the cookies, we had the kids bring their own sprinkles.  The bags worked well, for the most part.  We had a couple that split when we were trying to push down the icing and we had a couple that came out the zip part. But, we had no complaints and some kids stood there for the whole time just making cookies, I was impressed.

Everyone told us how great of an idea this was, and how much they loved it.  How well organized it was and all that, which was slightly hilarious, because we didn't do anything to organize it, really, just made cookies and frosting.  We also had the kids decorate bags and make cards for the home-bound.  They did such a great job and it was such a fabulous way to spread some cheer. 

I hope that the home-bound all get their bags and cards, the kids sure had fun doing it! 

It made for an exhausting couple of days, but well worth it!