Would it really be Christmas time without festive cookies by the platter- and basket- and cellophane bag-full? It’s as though neighbors, party hosts, and church ladies want all our seasonal dietary dreams to die a delicious death. Christmas cookies are everywhere.

Whether made with haphazard rainbow jimmies, meticulous royal icing, or secret family recipes, Christmas cookie baking represents many a rich tradition and happy memory for the young and old alike. My childhood memories include my mom buying tubes of premade sugar cookie dough for my brother and me to cut into holiday shapes, slather with canned frosting, and pepper with too many sprinkles — back when convenience was king and before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scared us all into making things from scratch.

But Christmas cookies are more than just tasty seasonal temptations and family baking conventions. They’re little opportunities to maintain order and create beauty, exercise creativity, slow down and cultivate patience, feast on the fruit of our labor in the art of celebration, and offer hospitality and neighborliness. In other words, making Christmas cookies reminds us of our imago Dei and displays a glimpse of our Creator — the One who left heaven’s glory for a dirty trough — to a watching world.

Order, Beauty, and Patience

Baking cookies is inherently orderly, even if the spatter pattern of batter left on your countertop begs to differ. The best cookies come from good recipes, and good recipes prescribe a defined list of ingredients and order of operations to assemble them. When we follow a cookie recipe, we acknowledge not only the inherent goodness of order but also that each action we take produces a consequence. Too little baking powder, too flat. Too long in the oven, too crispy. Double the recipe, double the yield.

Christmas cookies also invite us to get creative and make something beautiful. Sure, you could just pick up a tray of monochrome desserts at Costco for $10 and save yourself the hassle, but there’s something so satisfying about creating something pretty — and it’s supposed to be that way. We are little, imperfect reflections of the One who made us.

When God created the first man and woman, before subsequently “knitting” each of us together in our mother’s wombs, He called His creation “good.” He considered it lovely. Beautiful. And He scattered that beauty throughout all of creation, from the birds of the air to the lilies of the field. The Creator so cares about beauty that He crafted creatures and magnificent celestial bodies we humans will never even see — they’re just for His good pleasure and glory. The psalmist David calls them “the work of your fingers.”

So every time we “knit” things together and produce good work with our own fingers, we mirror the divine. Something as simple as baking cookies is no exception.

One of my favorite ways to do this is with cutouts and royal icing at Christmas time. While confections of all varieties can demonstrate beauty, from simple Mexican wedding cookies to spritz cookies resembling wreaths, trees, and snowflakes, there’s something about a blank sugar cookie canvas that invites creative juices to flow. You should really give it a try.

If you’re looking for a good sugar cookie cutout recipe, might I suggest Georganne Bell’s Vanilla 2.0? Thanks to a different YouTube baker’s recommendation, I follow this recipe but use dark brown sugar, salted butter, an added teaspoon of almond extract, two added teaspoons of butter extract (available at Hobby Lobby for about $5), and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder. After the cookies cool, I decorate them using this royal icing recipe from Paper Street Parlour.

This brings us to patience. Nobody ever picked up a piping bag and nailed color, consistency, and design on the first try. Creating lovely things, from art to virtue, takes time. Honing the skills to create them takes even longer. But it’s worth the effort.

The book of Isaiah evokes imagery of God as a Potter and His people as clay, the Artist and His medium. Unlike His original creation in the sinless garden, however, this clay is unruly. We “continued to sin,” and “like the wind our sins sweep us away,” Isaiah paints the picture. Yet the Potter continues to mold, patiently shaping and slowly transforming the obstinate material into a masterpiece. And so we practice patience.

Celebration and Neighborliness

Christmas cookies aren’t all about the process of making them though. Once they’re prepared, they can also help us to feast and celebrate. During this season of excessive gifting, Christians must remember what a great gift Giver we serve, especially if we are truly to eat and drink in a way that glorifies the Father. The One who “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” now “freely give[s] us all things.” Thus after the quiet anticipation of Advent, when Heaven meets Earth in Immanuel, we feast and rejoice, just as the Lord ordained for His people now and at the eternal banquet with Him in the age to come.

“Our hunger is a constant reminder that while our need and seeking can be temporarily satiated by the good things of the earth, it is part of a deeper longing that can only be satisfied through communion with him …” write Carrie Gress and Noelle Mering in Theology of Home.

We have so much to celebrate, and we also have so much to share. Christmas cookies are a tangible offering not just for holiday guests you invite into your house but for strangers you welcome into your life. Whether you’re new to a neighborhood or apartment complex, a friend group, a church, or something else, you can extend the spirit of hospitality outside the walls of your own home with the unprompted gift of a seasonal treat that says “I see you” and invites future conversation and maybe friendship. If we’re striving to constantly share the good news of the gospel and be natural inviters like Jesus, there may be no easier foothold than extending a plate of cookies at Christmas time.

“Hospitality is rooted in kindness — not a kindness that is mere politeness (though that is important) but a kindness that actively seeks to fulfill a need of another unprompted. It is a great balm that can heal, soften, and change the course of a conversation or a direction in someone’s life,” Gress and Mering write. “Certainly zeal, eloquence, and learning can convert hearts and minds, but rarely can they do so devoid of kindness.”

However poor an imitation we are, we are living, breathing reflections of our creative, beautiful, unchanging, patient, hospitable Savior — both when we take grand steps of faith and when we hunker down with our flour and sugar on snow days. This Christmas, while you make cookies or cozy up and eat them, ponder the kind Creator who left heaven to dwell with His creation, and share him with the searching world.