My favorite things to bake at Christmastime...

It's that time. You know... where life starts to look a little bit like this.

Baking cookies will always be my favorite part of December, more than twinkle lights, candy canes, mistletoe, and Christmas trees. For one, let's be real: they're full of butter and cinnamon and sugar and chocolate.

But more than that, it's about making memories. 

Like... I'll always remember my family getting together to make cut-out sugar cookies with vanilla buttercream, how we had no idea the chocolate chip peanut meltaways would make a hundred & twenty cookies, or how the first cookies we make every year (right after Thanksgiving) are raspberry almond shortbread thumbprint cookies... because we absolutely cannot wait one more day. 

How gingerdoodles came out by being way too lazy to bake two batches of cookies: my mom's favorite (gingersnaps) and my dad's favorite (snickerdoodles). 

... or how everytime we make peanut butter cup treats and peanut butter blossoms I somehow end up with the task of unwrapping all the chocolate kisses and peanut butter cups.  

Sometimes you just need to bake for yourself... like when these fluffernutter chocolate gobs went down.

I remember baking a plate of Mexican wedding cakes in high school for a Christmas party... and eating every last one with my best friend before class ever started. 

Or delivering cookie trays to the elderly in our church a few years back, full of peanut butter reindeer cookies, cinnamon sugar cookies, salt river bars, and gingerbread cookie sandwiches and getting totally unsolicited, important life advice in return: go to college, you're much too pretty to work, and get married already.

Last Christmas my mom taught me how to make her homemade English toffee... because apparently my almond cracker candy just wasn't the same thing. 

... and my dad taught me how to make brown sugar shortbread and Scottish shortbread cookie wedges because he felt they were important life skills. 

Inspire me. What are you baking this holiday season?