Christmas Cookies, Streamlined

12/7/10: I'm linking up to The Larson Lingo for a Virtual Cookie Exchange! See the link at the end of this post. This was originally posted 12/28/09:

I'm still taking a bloggy break until after January 3, but I'll be posting sporadically.

Most years, we bake lots and lots of Christmas cookies. Some years we've baked as many as twelve or fifteen varieties. This year, in an effort to streamline things, I cut down the list significantly. I skipped the more complicated, multi-step recipes altogether, and made only about five batches. I hadn't realized that most of them were bar cookies until I started putting them together on a plate!

At the bottom are the Chocolate Raspberry Crumb Bars that I keep talking about. The Sugar Cookie Cut-outs are easy to identify, and the bars topped with cinnamon sugar are Snickerdoodle Bars. At the very top are Peanut Butter Swirl Bars, which I think are my favorite of the new recipes. I took this picture before I added the Chocolate Rugelach to the plate; they've been in the freezer because they quickly get stale at room temperature.

An additional benefit of streamlining the cookie-baking process is that we don't have a ton of cookies at this point. (They may even be gone by the time you read this!) We certainly don't need to have dozens of cookies that last into January or even February!