Take me down to cookie town

Kayte and Katie will be happy to know that I am typing this from my parents' house, where the girls and I have spent the afternoon baking Christmas cookies. We have made English toffee bars and Scotch shortbread -- if I only had an Irish coffee and a copy of poet Dylan Thomas's perfect little book, A Child's Christmas in Wales, I would feel that the British Isles had been very well represented.

The Ka(y)t(ie)s were horrified to find out that I, Ebeneeza Scrooge-a-licious, bake cookies from scratch with my children once a year: at Christmas. Any other cookie that enters our home is either baked by the Keebler elves or the fine people at Nabisco. Sometimes we do "bake" them ourselves, using the break-and-bake kind found near the canned biscuits in your local grocery; when I mentioned this, the Ka(y)t(ies) both turned pale and had to shakily sit down.

That is not, they told me sternly, baking. It is faking, and it causes health problems in children.
Because presumably, they might run off and marry an elf someday and catch a cold living in that damp hollow tree.