My "must have" cookie this year is a modified version of the Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies with Cherries & Pecans recipe from here <http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/dessert/recipe-chocolate-chip-oatmeal-cookies-with-cherries-pecans-124638>

I de-gluten-ized it using gluten-free oats and oat flour, plus a little coconut flour. I eliminated the pecans and upped the cherries and chocolate chips (using the Ghirardelli 60% chips).

EVERYONE is asking for these for Christmas this year.

My sister-in-law's Linzer Tart cookies are absolutely the best. The best part of Christmas is when she hands us each our little tray to take home. It's the best gift of all.

The only cookies we ever made during the holidays were sugar cookies that we decorated as kids. I associate Christmas with homemade candy and quick breads

Scotcheroos. My grandparents would always bring them, and I thought they had scotch in them so I wouldn't eat many, but they are divine. I ruined the holiday-ness of them, though, by figuring out the recipe and making them for events all year round, but they still always bring me back to Christmases when I would sneak just one more.

My mother always made spritz cookies (butter cookies from a cookie press). Just this weekend I made them myself for the first time. This is the epitome of my childhood Christmas!

Snickerdoodles and lemon bars!

"Holiday Wreath" corn flake cookies. Same recipe as rice krispy treats, but using corn flakes, green dye and red hots as holly berries.

My fav is molasses cookies, made chewy from the recipe on the bottle. They are not too sweet, even a bit salty. I even serve them as appetizers. Yum.

We always make butter cookies, 7 layer bars, raspberry crumb bars, and pumpkin cranberry bread!

ChinaMK, ditto on those corn flake cookies! The Mother made them every year, several times. We also made a lot of walnut rugelach, covered in enough powdered sugar to make you choke, but oh man, what a way to go. And an almondy dough that we dyed half red and twisted together like candy canes, and when they came out of the oven, we sprinkled them with pureed sugar/candy canes! And pecan sandies!

Craving sugar like hellz bellz now.

@cdavis67- Thank you for finally solving a mystery I've been pondering for weeks. I had never even heard of a cookie platter associated with the holidays until a few weeks ago, and I wondered if I was missing something. It never occured to me to analogize it to holiday candy making.

some molasses ginger snaps and y recent fave glutenfree oatmeal puffed rice choc chip cookies here Oatmeal Choc chip cookes, gf and v

Chocolate thumbprints, crackles, and gingersnaps!!!

http://www.marthastewart.com/281540/chocolate-thumbprints

There MUST be chocolate chip, red lips, peanut butter (for my dad) and lemon bars (for my stepmom), but there are always at least 4 other kinds too... we have a Cookie Baking Day every year!

Peanutbutter blossoms, white chocolate macadamia, gingerbread, and mincemeat cookies!

I'm struggling with this. I grew up with a cookie master great aunt on one side of the family and a serious 3-tiered cookie tray on the other side, so I guess to me the essential point is Variety. But we do a really small Xmas now! Tiny batches of a few things? I want to make walnut penuche (which is really a fudge), butter cookies with cherries, iced hermit cookies, and at least a couple more. This is a pretty great problem to have, yes.

In my home, we always always baked cut out sugar cookies all day Christmas Eve, but that's it. Nothing before or after aside from a really yummy rum cake most years.

In my adult years, I go all out and middle of the month bake a zillion thick sugar cookies and elaborately pipe them, package them and ship them to close family. It's become my tradition my husband secretly hates! (I disappear for a week with a room full of cookies he can't eat!)

When I do cookie exchanges and things though, I like doing traditional speculoos or Linzer cookies. Nothing says fancy Christmas cookie to me like a linzer cookie (even though I'm not particularly fond of eating them!)

Snickerdoodles, pfefferneusse, and traditional sugar cookies always remind me of Christmas, because my mom always seemed to be baking like it was her job around that time! I've been craving molasses lately, so perhaps it's time to try my hand at some of these.

Russion tea cookies, lemon bars, peanut butter blossoms, cut-outs, egg nog logs, sandwich creams, party mix and candies (caramels, whip cream chocolates, turtles and choc covered pretzels). Boy were we busy! We've cut our favorites down to just a few in the last years.

sherri s-

what are whip cream chocolates? never heard of those but they sound interesting.

We often made and decorated cut-out sugar cookies when I was a kid, but not much else - my mom and I both bake pretty avidly, but it was hard to compete with my grandmother's rum balls and fruitcake. Now, my mother-in-law always sends over a platter with gingerbread, sugar cookies, shortbread, marzipan, mincemeat tarts, and more.

However, even though it's completely unnecessary, I've decided that I'm going to start my own holiday baking tradition as of this year, with cranberry-pecan shortbread and spicy gingerbread cut-outs.

Spritz, has to be green tree cookies with mulit-color sprinkles for the ornaments.

I love baking of all kinds--I love rolling out pie dough, mixing a batch of brownies or cookies or cakes. Recently I learned how to make a yeast raised sweet bread, babka. And I'm experimenting with making injera. Every year I look forward to baking a variety of cookies for the Christmas season BUT, I am completely indifferent to cut-outs. I try skipping it but my family begs for them. So for them I make cut-outs.

Molasses crinkles, chocolate cherry thumbprint cookies, Russian teacakes, shortbread, gingerbread men, fudge, cut-out sugar cookies...dozens and dozens! My siblings and I always looked forward to the Saturday in December when she'd spend the whole day baking cookies (she'd make much of cookie dough ahead of time). We'd help roll warm teacakes in powdered sugar and frost the sugar cookies and of course stir the fudge! Making christmas cookies with my mom is my favorite holiday memory.
I'll cease waxing nostalgic, but I love hearing about others' holiday cookie traditions!

frosted cut-out cookies, the spoon cookies from Gourmet (brown butter cookies sandwiched with jam), chocolate almond toffee, pecan fingers, rugelach, lemon bars, lace cookies. That's probably all for this year.

cinnamon shortbread. They smell like Christmas!

Almond-flavored candy cane cookies from the Betty Crocker cookbook.

There's also a recipe, iirc, that goes something like "combine a box of lemon cake mix and a tub of cool whip; bake" -- I remember these most distinctly from a year when we also did a lot of dusting with lemon-scented Pledge ...

Eggnog kringles are good for breakfast.

And there are tons of other good cookies (the King Arthur blackstrap spice crackles are a recent favorite) but those are the particularly Christmasy ones.

I love pfefferneuse, and the classic sugar cookies. I've been making peanut butter spritz cookies the past few years, too!

My mom and I split the baking. She makes almond crescents and her grandmother's recipe for butter cookies. I make apricot kolacky, cherry-walnut rugelach, orange lace cookies, and espresso meringues.

Molasses gems with golden raisins! Soft and chewy.

I love Christmas cookies! We always had Russian tea cakes but everything else varied year to year.

My grandmother used to make these horrible creme de menthe balls - nobody liked them, but she would make them year after year, insisting that we always loved them, and the was surprised when they were the only cookies left by New Years. All of her other cookies were great. She stopped baking a few years ago, but we always still have a lot of cookies around the holidays.

I like to make a bunch of different types of cookies and give them as gifts. For the past few years I've been building a mix of my own, adding one or two new varieties each year, and keeping the winners. Some favorites are 5-Spice Gingersnaps, Grapefruit sandwich cookies, Cherry and honey-almond shortbread, benne wafers, and chocolate peppermint bark cookies.

I bake smitten kitchen's brown butter brown sugar shorties just for myself, like Deb suggests :)

To bring to cookie swaps, I do Russian tea cakes, oatmeal/pecan/choc chip cookies, and sometimes thumbprint jam cookies. Also sometimes the chocolate crinkle cookies from Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking. For years, I've been putting off the earl gray tea cookies from The Kitchn... maybe I'll finally need to try those this year.

I try to always AT LEAST bake two Dresdner Christstollen and a bath of Vanillekipferln. Which might be odd for a french gal, but that's what I love :)

@Christine. Make them!! They're so easy and so fast to throw together. I just made a batch in ten minutes, wrapped them in plastic and tossed them in the freezer til I can invest the time to slice and bake them closer to Christmas. Will probably make another two or three different batches. Definitely a batch with matcha so they're all green and pretty for Christmas.