Christmas Cookie Gift Bags

By: Jennifer Frost

When you’re looking for quick gifts to give to family and friends, a great option is cookie gift bags. Especially during the holidays when you are already whipping up a storm with baked goods, cookie gift bags are easy to whip together and leave your friends and family happy and satisfied.

Cookies are a great way to gift bags because it is easy to double or triple batches of cookies. For my gift bags, I put together combinations of (1) White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies; (2) Peppermint Candy Cane Cookies; and (3) Peanut Butter Blossoms.

After you bake the cookies and let them cool, you portion them out. As seen above, I put cookies in Christmas themed tins; separating the chocolate cookies from the peppermint ones to prevent flavor contamination. Then, I put two containers in each bag. The bags I used had little gingerbread men on them. Next, I twisted the tops of the bags. Lastly, I cut ribbon in gold, red and green and tied it around the gingerbread bags and curled the ribbon with a pair of scissors.

These cookie gift bags went over well when I had family over and was able to send them home with some sweet treats.

For recipes of the cookies included in this article, check out our 12 desserts of Christmas posts coming out starting December 1st.

Fall Decorations

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and you’re probably already excited to decorate for Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited to decorate for Christmas. But I also love Thanksgiving. And in case you want a few festive things out for Thanksgiving or need some ideas I wanted to put this blog post up. These are my decorations for Fall that I did back in October which is why the photo above has a skeleton on the door. I know some of the items might be hard to find, but hopefully this will give you some ideas for things you can add in or that you can use for next year.

When decorating for Fall, I knew I wanted mums, decorative kale or cabbage, and specialty pumpkins and gourds. Several of these items might be hard to find now, but if you have some from your yard, you could switch them into planter boxes, put them in containers for a table scape, or see if there are any discounted items somewhere.

I found most of my things at a specialty garden store, but Home Depot had a few things and they might have some items on clearance.

In addition, I used some of the acorn squash I had grown in my garden. If you have squash in storage or want to buy some from the store, you could use those instead of specialty pumpkins that may be hard to find now.

I’m not in charge of decorations for Thanksgiving, but I’ve been looking at different items to think through what I could use and carry over from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I would love to use these pomegranates in a Thanksgiving table scape with some squash!

Let us know in the comments below what decorations you’re using for Thanksgiving!