As you watch the snowfall outside the window, collecting itself on the sill, your teeth sink into the delight of a Christmas cookie. Fresh out of the oven, the warm, almost heavenly substance carries nostalgic flavors and synthesizes all the moods revolving around the Christmas spirit. The Christmas cookie, the bite-size form of the holiday season, is essential to every traditional American Christmas. In this review, the feasibility and overall taste of the sweets are considered. 

Sugar Cookies

Sugar cookies are comparable to the idea of the American dream— impractical and overrated. Only appeasing the visual sense, the cookies fail at doing everything else. Brightly colored and way too sugary, the cookie portion is often stale and falls apart in the mouth. Even freshly baked sugar cookies underperform; after reaching room temperature, the treat is rendered a waste of calories considering their bland flavor and banal texture. 

Gingersnap Cookies

Gingersnap cookies, similarly well liked as conventional winter cookies, evade much criticism. While not as simple as sugar cookies, they look an unappetizing mess of sugar and brown dough. However, first impressions can be deceiving. The spices of ginger, molasses, and cinnamon fuse together to complement the sugar and melt in your mouth. The sense occurs while your teeth interact with the coarse sugar grains, giving a satisfying crunch that sweetly contrasts with the chewy dough. The taste is refreshing and not too heavy or rich. 

Marzipan-Stuffed Date & Walnut Cookies

Without being too rich, nut-oriented sweets are still flavorful. A particular arrangement that makes the cookie pleasing is the block of marzipan between the two walnuts. This simple combination is highly palatable, with good texture and a smooth, buttery taste. A variation of the cookie uses dates, however it loses the crunch of the walnuts. Nevertheless, the rendition gains all that the dried fruit has to offer. The date, a sweet fig-like treat, is complemented by the similarly smooth marzipan. Considering the simplicity of the desert and its easiness in reproducibility, the pseudo-cookies have the best selection possible between taste and overall practicality. 

All food should prioritize taste over appearance, especially Christmas cookies. Stale cookies are an insult to the holiday and interrupt all the other aspects of it. Cookies that are tasty satisfy the requirements of a good Christmas cookie, while those that encompass generationally exchanged recipes are all the better. Considering this, in my circumstance, the walnut-marzipan cookies achieve both cultural and taste requirements of the ideal Christmas cookie. 

Extreme difficulty and intricacy are not always required to make a holiday dessert. The gingersnap cookies were proven to taste best with its refreshing taste and their ability to satisfy all sucrose-related desires. 

Art by Eric Chen